


Roll to Seduce:  Lawful Evil

by alephthirteen



Series: Unmapped Relays [1]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), Carmilla (Web Series), Game of Thrones (TV), Mass Effect Trilogy, Supergirl (TV 2015), Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: A dash of teasing, And Play Dungeons and Dragons, And Retired, Author Threw Their Fandoms In a Blender, Blowing on Dice for Luck, Dragons, Dungeons, F/F, F/M, Flirting With Other People's Partners, Getting distracted, Harems, It's Entirely Possible that Some of These Will Have Prequels..., Our Heroines Have Had Enough, Palaces, Partner Teams, Plot is Well Lubed, Plotting with Concubines to Distract The Enemy, SUFFER WITH ME, Seriously., The Author Found a Harem Fic They Liked, Then Added Gay Panic, This plot got away from me, To Live In Lazy Splendor, Who's Turn Is it Right Now???, Why Are You Even Suprised, Yes There Will Be Sections That Are Entirely Dungeons and Dragons, and so on - Freeform, because why the fuck not, dice - Freeform, dying, so here you are
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:21:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 20,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26750557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alephthirteen/pseuds/alephthirteen
Summary: Mad gods placated.  Monsters between stars ground underfoot.  The First Evil cut off at the knees.  Madmen in chains and would-be-gods broken in battles that shook the clouds.  Armies and traitors slain.  Lives lived only for the good of others.  Never themselves. Never their lovers.Universes have been saved.  They are owed happiness.-----"Liara?"An uncoordinated blue hand flops randomly in the direction of her pillow and smacks Shepard on the nose."Siame, it'searly.""I know.  But, all the little blue babies have sitters and you and I have guests."Liara sits upright.  Spilling the finest silk money can buy around her middle and baring a pair of pale berries that nearly has Shepard canceling the game."Goddess! Today?""Yes," Shep laughs.  "Today.  And we're hosting, so..."Liara groans."I have nine projects in the drive core alone, siame.  Counting only the unstable ones. This is a terrible idea.  I can't host.  Not like Benezia."Shepard stops buttoning her jacket, slings her legs over Liara and kisses her.  Once per word."They.  Will.  Adore.  You."Liara huffs."Stupid sexy humans."
Relationships: Female Shepard/Liara T'Soni, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor, Laura Hollis/Carmilla Karnstein/Danny Lawrence, Tara Maclay/Willow Rosenberg, Waverly Earp/Nicole Haught
Series: Unmapped Relays [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1967521
Comments: 37
Kudos: 15





	1. Clearing a Table

**Author's Note:**

> This work is the "sequel" to Mundis Triformis and occurs after our girls save the multiverse, stop the Reapers, defeat the First Evil, destroy Bulshar, and prevent the anglerfish god from returning.
> 
> It happens end-of-series for all, including Supergirl.

**Relay 0 | Dark Space | 100,000 light-years from Earth | After the War**

**The wreckage of the Central Computational Core (CCC) of the "Reaper" artificial intelligence species**

**The seat of the Prothean Empress Ascendant and location of the Milky Way embassies**

  
  
  
"Liara?"

An uncoordinated blue hand flops randomly in the direction of her pillow and smacks Shepard on the nose.

" _Siame_ , it's _early_."

"I know. But, all the little blue babies have sitters and you and I have guests."

Liara sits upright. Spilling the finest silk money can buy around her middle and baring a pair of blueberries that nearly has Shepard canceling the game.

"Goddess! Today?"

"Yes," Shep laughs. "Today. And we're hosting, so..."

Liara groans.

"I have nine projects in the drive core alone, _siame_. Nine. Counting only the unstable ones. This is a terrible idea. I can't host. Not like Benezia. They won't like me, Elizabeth."

Shepard stops buttoning her jacket, climbs back into bed, slings her legs over Liara and kisses her. Once per word.

"They. Will. Adore. You."

"How do you know?"

"I'm human. I adore you."

"Seems like an insufficient sample size," Liara huffs.

Shep hums, enjoying the warm, damp breeze of Liara's breath on her lips. She doesn't so much care what's being said, as long as she can _feel_ it on her skin.

"It's not fair, to do that when we're arguing. Stupid sexy humans."

"Really, it's just the one sexy human."

Liara chuckles.

"Thank the goddess. If the rest of them were like you, I'd never get out of bed. Just stay here, melding all day. Be like a queen bee. Always making babies."

"Mmm," Liz muses. "Best stay married, then. Three's enough and you're doing such wonderful work for your students."

"I agree. Let's stay married."

\-----

It is, Shep decides, nearly _impossible_ to help a cute biotic prodigy pick an outfit. Piece after piece sails by her head with the speed of a charge attack, one heel even embedding itself in the bulkhead behind her which is crystallized around the impact where it decelerated back below lightspeed.

"Babe," Shep sighs, slapping a warp field on her unruly bondmate.

"Calm down. This isn't the Synod of Peeresses grilling you about funding research into the Temple. These are some friends. Relaxing. Besides, the Synod were quaking in their robes, remember?"

Liara shivers.

"Hey. C'mere."

With a flick of the wrist, she draws Liara in like a breath.

"I don't want to calm down."

"If you didn't want to calm down, you'd have your barrier up, hon. You wouldn't let me pull you because you don't let people do anything you don't want. I'd be apologizing and getting my teeth back in order for Chakwas to reinsert."

"Disgusting. You are disgusting."

Shep shrugs.

"Well, I mean, we can't all be the platonic ideal of the feminine. The warmth of family and the laughter of forever echoing in the cold valleys of the mind. The body pulled open like a peeled fruit so the mind can experience more."

"Firstly, don't paraphrase your wedding vows," Liara grumbles, shaking a hairbrush. "Second, I am so glad you dropped that fruit metaphor. At least until the honeymoon."

"Thirdly, why am _I_ holding a hairbrush?"

"Probably because it smells like my hair."

"Ah. Yes, it really does."

Liara breathes in then sets it by her jewelry.

"Lastly, asari do not have sex powers!"

"Beg to differ, Liara. Do you realize that no matter what human I might have loved, it would not be a _fraction_ what we share? Not sexually. Mentally. I can be inside you, feeling your thoughts...drowning in it. With just your hand holding mine. How can you not see what that is?"

She strokes a finger down Liara's forecrests, letting the eezo in both their bodies crackle and sizzle with the touch.

"We couldn't imagine making love this way, no human could, until First Contact. It escaped even our most lurid writers. Meld, love, let me in."

Liara's eyes fill with black almost instantly and Shep's match.

_It's so easy now._

_It is isn't it?_

_Practice?_

_Practice._

_Decades..._

_A century on Tuesday..._

_Goddess..._

_Not one night wasted..._

"I feel that perhaps the savior of the galaxy is easier to defeat than anyone ever knew," Liara chuckles, offering a hand. "Thank you."

Shep takes the hand and gets to her feet. She shakes off the fuzz slower than usual. She meant for Liara to lean on her, to take some of the calmness for herself. She didn't realize it would leave her brain flickering, trying to remember if her hands were the pink ones or the blue ones.

"You really let me have it. I couldn't tell...who was who."

"That's the point, siame. You usually can't. We were taught to. Peeresses especially and even more so the Thrity. Books. Libraries were written on the meld and I don't mean the scientific ones. I rarely can, anymore."

"I think it's the cerebellum graft," Shep jokes. "From after the war. The one from that sweet volunteer in Serrice."

"Yes, perhaps. While I certainly enjoyed the original, I can't deny that the asari in your head eases the meld. Should write the Illusive Man a thank you."

Shep chuckles.

"Dear racist lunatic, thank you for having your buthcers turn my human bondmate into an inkblot test of stolen organs, genetically altered tissue, cybernetics and trauma. Thank you for making her lead nineteen species in a fight for survival and getting yourself brainwashed and blowing her up again so that I could have competent doctors fix her," Shepard jokes. "She's so much better at sex now."

Liara's face softens.

"So much better at not _dying_. Not leaving me. I won't pretend that the cartilage infusions aren't fun. They let me bend you in amusing ways. Instinctive," Liara admits. "My deepest, darkest instincts assume I'm with another asari, not a stiff-bone and...Goddess. With you it's like breathing. The kroganized muscle tissue does make things more...intense."

Liara's eyes flit to the back of the closet, leading Shepard's gaze. Warpfire wraps around the toybox, tickling at the latch.

"Oh, no!" Shep laughs, slapping a statis field under it to keep the box both intact and shut. "I put _that_ on and neither of us are going to make the game, even if I carry you."

"Pity."

Shep straightens her jacket. 

"The one Aria gave you?" Liara laughs.

"What?" Shep scoffs. "It fits well. Criminals know their biker jackets."

"Yes," Liara says, her blue lips showing the battle she's making not to laugh. "It does."

"What?"

Liara snorts.

"Babe. What?"

"Do you think that matrons six hundred years into a murder spree give their human _friends and acquaintances_ of clothing? One tightly-fitted piece?"

Shep groans.

"She wanted to fuck me."

"You're learning," Liara chortles. "I mean, she probably wanted to see you in _only this._ If it didn't stretch, it'd never reach to buckle up. There's barely enough here with it open to keep her hands warm when she was done with your tits. Probably why the shoulders are formed like this."

Liara slides her hands around Shep's tunic. It's black with an Alliance arrowhead, probably leftover from one of the thousands of physical training sessions. Cotton. She and places her own hands on her bondmate's shoulders. There's barely space above the fabric and below the leather for her hands.

Warmth. Pure. Perfect. Comforting.

"Yes. That's why. Mmm...mammals."

Shep laughs.

"Uh, babe? You are perfectly mammaled yourself."

Shep glances at her chest with a crooked grin.

"Pervert! You know what I mean. Earth creatures run hotter than we do."

Satisfied her hands are warm, she pulls back tugs on the hem.

"Goddess, but she wrapped you in death," Liara breathes. "What was it? Rachni skin and thresher scales with geth plating for the clasps?"

"Think so, yeah."

Liara smoothes the smoky black hide back over Shepard's chest.

"I'll have to have other pieces commissioned."

"Will you?"

"Hmm."

Liara goes back to the closet, twirling the haptic controls madly.

"What can you tell me about this game we're playing?"

Shep exhales.

"Twentieth-century Earth. It's called Dungeons and Dragons. We pretend to be other people, we face monsters, a story gets told. We laugh. We drink. Eat too much. We play until it's late and we can't focus."

"Sounds positively decadent. How does the story work, with so many telling it?"

"Dice. We roll dice and that determines what happens. We're free to embellish but the dice define the plot of the story. Whether an attack fails or succeeds. Or whether a guard is convinced of a lie."

"Dice?"

"Physical dice, yes. Tables and numbers."

"Thrilling," Liara drawls. "And less than decadent."

"Well, it was created by accountants in a mostly pre-computer era. They needed uncertainty and they made do with the concepts they had."

"Clearly."

Shep tosses a small velvet bag cross the room.

"For you."

Liara spills the contents into her hand. Her eyes go between the dice and Shepard.

"They're black eezo," she murmurs.

Shep nods.

"From the core here. The most valuable substance in the universe. Carved them myself," she explains, letting warpfire gather on her fingertip.

"The big one, there, that's the D20. Most of the big decisions are there. Attacks, saving throws, success in lying, intimidation, seduction..."

"Seduction? This little thing? This determines whether seduction is successful?" 

Shep rolls her eyes.

"Here."

She goes into her pocket. It's nothing but stamped steel coated in omni-gel sealant so it doesn't rust. She made it in basic. Kenzi pocketed ejected shell casings from the course in improvised weaponry that still taught how to use pre-eezo gauss guns and even chemical-fired rifles. Shep hammered them into shape with her biotics. 

They played every other night in the barracks. Right until they deployed to Akuze. Shep hasn't played since.

"All right. In this story, you're a princess. I'm a guard, standing between you and the bed and here on your father's orders to take you downstairs and make you eat breakfast. To go back to bed, you have to seduce me. Roll yours."

"I..." Liara stammers. "That does sound like something Atheyta would do, quite honestly."

"Explain more."

Shep tosses her D20 on the floor.

"Seventeen. If you roll over a seventeen, I throw you on that bed and we reschedule. If you don't, I make you remember to eat and then we go play the game."

"No cheating?"

"No cheating," Shep says, hoping it sounds stern.

Liara levitates the dice in one hand and flicks the other. It spins, dancing on a column of broken gravity before Liara snaps her fingers sending it clattering to the deck. Frost surrounds it and covers it and the only place it's melted clean is on the grooves she cut in with her powers. The eezo-sensitivity worked better than she hoped.

"Nine. Therefore, I am not seduced, so we go have fun with our friends."

"Your friends," Liara jokes. "You're the one who made them all tell us their real names."

"Which one of us founded the _'Saved the world, now losing our minds'_ support group on the Exonet? Remind me." 


	2. Shooing the Cats Away

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why yes, all the chapter titles will be something you might do to prepare to host D&D or something that might happen in a session. Why do you ask?
> 
> \-----  
> I know canon is that Danny is a vampire in Carmilla Season 3 but by the movie, she's doing some kind of secret agent thing for the supernatural community. I'm not sure it would have fit white-knight Danny and I bet she kept looking for ways out. This canon is that she found an experimental treatment for vampirism but it didn't return her to ordinary human (she'd be dead) it just muted her vamp powers.
> 
> Most of them.

**Toronto | Lester B. Pearson International Airport**

Danny groans beside her. 

"Babe. Leg bouncing. Stop."

Laura hadn't noticed she was but sure enough, the bottled water Danny's clutching to her sweaty head is going full Jurassic Park right now.

"Sorry," she mumbles.

"Just...easy on your poor sick wife, you cretin. M'bout to shift."

The airport isn't innocent; especially the Shadow Airlines terminal where there's a ghost struggling with her improperly-magicked luggage and swearing each time her hand goes right through. A middle-aged witch wearing a conference lanyard is chatting with her simply massive dracofeminine friend, laughing and reminding her to duck the twenty-foot ceilings and suspending a bag of chocolate covered pretzels between them on cords of lightning, perhaps complimenting her on finding a suit that fit _that torso_ and still looked professional. A dark-skinned cambion with entirely crimson eyes and rust-red skin greeting his pale, almost human, ordinary-pink teenage daughter and scolding her for the human boyfriend's she brought with and his hollow, half drained gaze. She wrings her tail, ignoring the angry flicks of he spade-shaped tip and shifts foot to foot anxiously. The welcome back sign is perched between her curly-cue horns, written on a small piece of white cardboard. Her wings flutter in irritation as the people parts -- hands, feet, big words -- try to hold back the demon-y parts that want that boy for a snack.

Laura can practically hear her whiny, glamoured voice. Sex with the volume dial turned up to eleven.

_'but daddy!'_

_'but nothing, young lady!'_

The boy will be lucky to make it through their next date without smelling salts and if she really can't keep her tail in her pants, he may spend a night in the hospital. Then again, Laura supposes that the existence of an entire race of female cambions suggests that some men are happy to make that trade just as the father's existence proves more than a few human women will skirt death for a wild ride.

Then the girl's mother comes out and _oh_ Laura understands now. Cherry-red skin, dressed to kill, shiny black horns and cheekbones sharp as knives. This girl isn't a hybrid. She was hoping that her father would be more forgiving, perhaps because he doesn't know what it feels like and she wanted the matter settled before her mother came around. Her mother who probably knows exactly what it feels like -- horns like that grow over centuries -- and has had to hold back or simply taken the last drop of a mans life herself in the past. Sure enough, her mother pinches one knife-sharp ear between her fingers and says something, no more than a few words, Just like that, the would-be sex demon is sniffling and melting into a hug.

"You're people watching," Danny teases. "S'cute. Demonic family values in the corner?"

"Yeah."

"It's just so Disney when you have context," Danny agrees.

"Trying to distract myself from seeing you hurting, Danny. You could, you know...shift. New laws and all."

Laura glances at the 'Come to Canada' initiative posters from the Ministry of the Interior with their World War II poster stylings and the menagerie of ordinary, magical and hybrid people crossing a street together on their way to work..

Danny shakes her head.

"Self-control. Not that simple. Everyone's welcome but weres and vamps."

Laura sighs.

"It's really rude," she complains. "You guys came out first."

Danny chuckles.

"Yeah. That's why they're afraid. When we did it, it was scary. Lockdowns. Quarantines. Calling up the army and all that. By the time pink, horny, and winged over there told her teacher it was scary as filling out school paperwork. The world hadn't ended. The nightmare part was over. Carm and I give people flashbacks."

Laura pats Danny's knee. Now she's the one twitching.

"Now disembarking Shadow Airlines flight 208 from Graz, Austria."

Passengers spill out, perhaps two dozen. It's a small plane and the airline only goes direct from Toronto to Graz in the first place because of the founding sisters.

Mattie has blown past ages ago, probably that gust of wind Laura felt. Off to lighten some clubgoers a pint or two each.

Carmilla shakes the captain's hand, looking exactly as disgusted to be making nice as she always does. Her burgundy slacks are tailored, no doubt at Matties insistence and her blouse looks like whipped cream, it's so shiny and moves so easily as she shakes hands. A pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses rest on her face. Since it's indoors, night, and she's standing in the lights-off safe space of Shadow's terminal, she's hiding her eyes. No doubt the smell of human blood and post-flight body odor combined with the stress of travel and the anticipation of seeing her girls has pushed them past their usual chocolate-brown to their full, terrifying, vamped-out state. Gold and bright, simmering like a hot brand. 

Laura's been pinned by that gaze so often it's almost to the point where chocolate coins with gold wrappers send her panties sliding to the floor.

"That's our girl," Danny coughs.

"Yeah," Laura coos. "There's our girl."

Carmilla detaches from the employees, sharing a laugh with either a dracofem or a minotauress flight attendant, then beelines for Laura and Danny. Walking. Then running. Then blurring.

Laura is bundled up in arms and hands like steel and Carm is huffing her nose in her hair.

"I'm so sorry. To both of you."

"Just tell us you didn't eat the VP of Finance and we forgive you," Danny jokes.

Danny's body is fighting. The curse in her must be screaming, like it knows it's being purged. Doctor Sathya was right. Danny could lose some of the vampire but not all. Surgery was the only option, to put an anchor in. All that magic had been going to bloodlust and glamour and pyrokinetic is now funneled only into her shift, trading the vampire for her cat shape.

Her shift is pressing hard now. Her coppery mane is growing so fast it's visible to the naked eye and her white-knuckled grip on the armrest is quickly furring up. Her cat shape is nothing like Carmilla's sleek, black panther. Danny hulks out into a massive Siberian tigress with a glossy, thick coat of white and black except for the head and neck. With the bulk and the fluffy coat Laura can't get her hands out of comes a single-minded set of goals. Eat. Sleep. Fuck. 

"Ugh, I should have. Making me miss your last treatment, Danny. Laura's article."

"It's a blog, babe. You read it over there."

"No, I didn't."

"You didn't?"

"Figured it's only half the story. See the sausage being made if I asked you to read it to me."

"I want to go home," Danny groans.

"Help me with her, cupcake."

"Always."

Laura gets under one side of Danny and Carm gets the other. They stop long enough for Laura to fumble a phone out and call for an Uber, flicking through a couple drivers before she finds a scruffy young man with a electric SUV and a 4.9 from what the app calls 'gothic' passengers.

"I swear she already _weighs_ what the tiger does."

"Asshole," Danny groans.

"Maybe later. I did buy a new harness."

Finally, after an awful day of clinics, antiseptics and heartache, Laura gets to watch something perk Danny up.

\-----

Laura's phone chirps not long after the driver winds off the airport's ramp.

"Shoot."

"Something wrong?" Danny rumbles.

"Down, tigger," Carmilla teases. "You could sense if she was hurt. It's confusing right now. But you could hear or see or smell if she was in real trouble, remember?"

"Calendar reminder," Laura tells them. "The gaming group."

"Tonight?"

"Want me to cancel?" Laura asks Danny.

"No," Danny chuckles. "You were looking forward. It's a couple of days, right? Tomorrow will be better."

Carmilla groans.

"You want me to play Dungeons and Dragons."

"Yes."

"With space pirates, one of whom's an alien."

"Pretty sure she's more a space commando but yeah."

"And a curse-bearer, like it's no big deal that it was a _Biblical_ curse. And a Superhero."

"She promised to not wear spandex!"

"And a vampire hunter."

"Best behavior, the witches she's coming with promised."

"And some blonde I've never heard of."

"Well, the group chat has her as the MotherOfDragons and her wife's handle was RedWolfOfWinter so how lame could they be?"

"Lame," Carmilla and Danny agree.


	3. Being Nervous

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know other folks experience with OCD and mine has been a mix of some symptoms being mild and some symptoms being crushing. 
> 
> I based Lena's coping and rituals on mine.

**National City California, United States, Earth (Prime) | Seaside Lofts**

"Lee?" Kara calls.

Lena makes some sort of small noise, even she isn't sure what it sounded like.

There are seven types.

Lena finds it helps if she says it out loud when choosing, especially since no one bothered to just invent a hundred-sided dice rather than re-using the D10 shape.

"D4," she whispers. "D6, D8, D10, D12, D20, D100."

She pulls a bulk, plastic set of dice forward and taps each dice with her right index, then goes back with the left.

Seven.

Seven times seven is forty-nine.

Looking at the table she emptied her purse on, Lena thinks there might be five times that many dice here.

Too many to choose from. So she taps each dice seven times.

"Lee? Oh honey..."

Kara's somewhere very far away and yet there are two strong arms around her. Lips on the top of her head.

"Lena, are you?"

"It's not an episode," Lena finally grinds out. "With you, I haven't had one. Not since we started dating. Not truly, not with you going with me and waiting and making sure the doctors listen when I tell them about side effects."

Kara's grin is so bright, Lena could burn to a crisp in it.

"You help me," Lena mumbles. "More than you help anybody else."

"You matter more than anybody else."

Lena chuckles.

"Don't tell the human race that."

"Saved 'em five or six times. Gonna save you now," Kara grumbles.

Lena chuckles.

"I suppose I went and did the ritual because I'm just...well, coping. This brings back some pretty thick memories."

"Tell me," Kara growls, never removing her lips from Lena's scalp.

Lena tilts her head up so she can look at Kara. So she can remind herself that this woman is real, let alone hers.

"Last time I played was with Mercy. Getting back in the groove because I wanted to show Andrea how. The night before the MIT-Harvard mixer where I realized that Andrea betrayed me."

"And then Andrea didn't work out," Kara realizes. "And Mercy went bad and you couldn't help. You didn't get a chance to say goodbye before she died."

"Yes. I don't suppose Andrea's really a D&D type anymore anyway. Too busy fucking her way through the spoiled rich girls of the southern hemisphere."

"Do you still want to go?"

Kara's learned to ask, bless her. Not to assume that these lockups mean Lena wants out of the party, game night, fundraiser or walk around the park.

"Yes, Kara."

"OK. But no talking shop. We're going to relax. I don't care if the rice papers come back, that's Shepard's problem."

"Reapers."

"What? That..."

Kara groans.

"That sounds way more like an extinction-level threat. That makes a lot more sense than what Carm was saying. Stupid mean vampire. Want some help picking?"

Kara nods at the dice.

"Please. You do realize that for a nerd girl, this is basically like letting her buy you lingerie?"

Kara's wide-eyed, panicked face is just priceless. It lingers for a long time. Lena has to kiss the arm draped over her neck to reboot her wife.

"Liar."

"I'm hurt, Kara. I do not lie. _Luthors_ lie. I'm a Luthor-Danvers so therefore, I am reformed. I don't lie. I _sass_."

"Yes, yes you certainly do. Hmm..."

Kara's hands fly across the table in a blur. 

"Not those," Kara decides.

There's the sound of running water and then Lena sees the punishingly bright blue glare of heat vision in the corner of her eye. Her wife has a small, six-sided brick of what looks like tungsten in her hand. Her heat vision is snaking along the surface cutting neat lines. Latin numerals, then Kryptonian ones. She drops the metal in a flask of ice water where it sizzles and spits. Then picks up an eight-sided chunk.

Lena can only watch in awe.

\-----

Lena huffs.

"So maybe _not_ tungsten next time," she grumbles. She had to switch her purse for a backpack. Seven dice each multiplied by seven types is a heavy load when using metal half again as dense as lead.

"Eh," Kara chuckles. "They're your workout dice now."

The door latch turns with a crisp click and the hum after and the whiff of ozone signal the L-Corp and Kryptonian security system coming online.

"Shall we take the stairs?" Kara jokes.

"Mmm. For variety."

At one point, presumably, the elevator in Kara's building worked. Perhaps. If so, it was a century ago when this was still a grocer's warehouse, not university-facing apartments.

Now it would be a damn travesty if Lena were ever to have it repaired.

"Supergirl!" shrieks the boy from 4-C moments before he crashes into Kara's knees.

"Tal, you have to be nice to Lena, too. Good manners."

Lena kneels to speak to the child only to end up falling on her butt. She's never having been gladder for her relaxed status at L-Corp. In her office attire, she would have just shredded the skirt.

"You're silly!"

"It would appear I am!" she chortles. "Help me up."

"Milady," he jokes, offering his hand.

Kara watches, careful that Lena doesn't tip the six-year-old back with her.

"Very chivalrous, thank you."

"Every child on the block is going to be so polite they're ready to represent the good name of House El," she mutters.

"No," Kara muses. "Not ours. Ours are going to be trouble. I think that's a tradition in _both_ of our families. We both were the odd ones. So they're going to be like their mommas."

"Ours?" Lena mumbles.

Kara's knuckle traces Lena's cheek.

"Ours, my little raven. Yours and mine."

Kara pulls Lena's hand from her hip and puts it to her own _criminally_ hard, furrowed abs.

"Together."

_She can't possibly be..._

Except she could. Two-ovum fertilization might be fifty years past Earth's medicine, or five hundred. No one knows. Not even Lena herself, not with all the knowledge available to a motivated lesbian with bottomless pockets, an energetic ego, and a research staff of thousands to set upon pet projects. If any woman has the science or is owed the favors, it's Kara. 

Lena is rifling through her memory for what sort of Kryptonite might hurt her wife enough to make her explain _that little nugget_ without hurting any hypothetical babies when Kara spots her sister.

"Alex!"

Alex is leaning up against a hot-rod red Subaru.

_Subtle..._

Alex's hair has gray in it now. Half a lock, if that. Kelly has been good for Alex. No booze, vegan everything, plenty of exercise. Desk job. Couples yoga that maybe ends up involving actual yoga. Lena wouldn't know. They tried a few times and all Lena learned was that Kara's muscles flexing in sunlight rather quickly ruins her workout focus.

Two small humans are growing inside Kelly, now. Kara calls them 'gumdrops' and poor Kelly Olsen puts up with her. Lexia and James, named after lost siblings. Kelly's and Lena's. Babies who give Alex every reason to live rather than fling herself facefirst into whatever wants human dead. 

Forty is the new thirty, CatCo says. It still looks good. Forty-one doesn't merely look good on Alex. It looks _goddamned lethal_ on Alex.

The sisters Lena close and converse for a moment in some half-whispering, half-telepathic thing they do. Lena lets herself hang back. They don't lie to her, she trusts this. Kara only ever lied once if Lena really thinks about it and it was a big one. So big that she can't help but believe Kara now. Never again. No one as bright-eyed and eager as Kara could hold any lie in, even a white lie about Lena's hair. Not after the Big Lie about her identity.

"Wish I could come with," Alex laughs, hugging Kara. "Kelly's nervous about the virus that's running around. So is my guy at the CDC. Probably another lockdown this year. If they do..."

Kara nods.

"Anything like multiverse gates, portals, anything like that shuts first. So you have to be with your babies. You're missing so much fun, Ally!"

"You are _way too excited_ about this," Alex complains, shoving her immovable sister playfully. "Kind of jealous."

"You've been to space," Kara teases.

"Space. Not deep space. Not another universe's deep space in the guts of an ancient civilization. With blue space women and dragons and vampires and witches."

"I know, right?" Kara crows, her blue eyes flashing with bottled-lightning mischief.

Alex shrugs.

"Sounds pretty gay, the group you're going with."

Lena laughs.

"Witches and vampires, yes," Lena agrees. "But are dragons queer culture? Discuss."

Kara claps her hands gleefully.

"Did you bring it?"

Alex rolls her eyes.

"Can't believe I'm saying this but yes, trunk."

Kara lifts the trunk. Inside is a Coluan-made bottle with a very angry, very nasty-looking severed head in it. 

"Was he that ugly before?" Kara mutters. "Rao, maybe I shouldn't have cut it off..."

"Granny Goodness fucking was," Alex complains, shaking the still-healing right shoulder.

"How's the shoulder?" Lena asks. 

"Improving. Whatever those nanites you guys managed to get out of Spheerical Industries research are magic, I tell you."

A young woman jogs by with the chirp of _Hi, Kara!_ that forms a loud, bright cloud around Lena whenever she leaves home.

She's wearing the best-selling T-Shirt on Amazon currently.

_Multiversal Championship Scoreboard_

_Darkseid: 0 National City: 1_

Lena owns one for every day of the week. but she will go to her grave denying she founded a shell company merely to make celebratory shirts for her wife's victories.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is sort of my 'quarantine fic' about odd roommates but I'm using a fictional virus. Scientifically speaking, viruses happen and they jump from animals to humans and things like this will happen again, at least somewhere and with enough severity to merit at least localized quarantines.
> 
> Hopefully we will deal with them better as a species...


	4. Feed the fish

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the books, Dany and Sansa are about thirteen at the start and it's not clear that much time passes. Missandei was around nine (if I recall) when Dany met her.
> 
> George R. R. Martin doesn't allow his characters to cope. I've used more book than show here so let's just assume those wars took a few years to fight and that our girls are eighteen or so.  
> \-----  
> Ornela isn't an OC, she appears in the episode in Season 6 where Daneyres burns the Khals in Vaes Dothrak.  
> \-----  
> I genderbent Drogon to be a female dragon because I wanted to borrow other things from Anne McCaffery's "Dragonriders of Pern" series and there, the dragon females are massive compared to the males. This seems like a good nod and a way for more dragons in the world after the war killed the other two. It's not clear that **anyone** in the world actually knows how dragons reproduce, at least fully.

**The Red Cove | Westeros**

**(150 leagues from the site of King's Landing)**

The sea slashes against the knife-like rocks at the mouth of the harbor, riding a fast westward wind. The Greyjoy fleet has left, save for Yara's pride and joy, the Queen's Axe. That beast of a thing she took from Euron with its great iron boarding claw and black sails wide as a dragon's wingspan. Gods but the Dornish women she keeps abord seem strange on deck amid the gray, worn faces of Iron Islanders. Proof of Yara's supremacy and her pledge to treat rapers as harshly as the other kingdoms is in every half-naked woman walking the high deck or the shoreline for some fresh air. Much to the dismay of the whoremongers, the Ironborn are never eager to be in harbor too long especially if weather might pin them there. So the great chains are up now, lacquer freshened to a shiny black to keep from rusting before the cooler months. They hold the harbor shut as sure as a bolt shuts a dungeon door. Should anyone wish to assail her home or the common homes that scatter the shores of the Red Cove like foam inside a seashell they must be willing to sail their first rows of ships straight into three bands of iron and have their men climb the wreckage, the cliffs and the hail of Unsullied spears and Wildling arrows to follow. before they have any hope of reaching the guard towers.

It's cold. Gods but it's cold. She gathers the outer layers of her coat -- her wife's influence, Dany rarely wore more than draped silk -- close in and taking it as a signal, her bloodriders tense. Their horses knacker and toss, sense their riders discomfort.

"Just the cold," Dany assures Ornela.

Ornela doesn't even turn her head and her voice is a viper's hiss when she orders her men to take a pace back. The girl is khaleesi in all but name. The girl never left her side after Dany put the Khals to the torch. It wasn't until Sansa climbed on top of her in the marriage bed that Dany truly knew why. 

Whether Sansa heard the scrape of knife on sharkskin or had been playing the girl the entire time, she never said. Sansa had been taken against her will, as Dany had. Never again. They both had learned how to fight, to kill or at least make it come to blood. So that either a living, victorious woman or a dead body would be in the bed in the morning. A woman's only victory, in dark times.

Her wolf dodged the thrust, took Onrela's knife hand under and held on until the lack of blood flow convinced her. Presented her captive face-down in the furs like a cat presents a mouse at the doorstep. Dany only nodded and then Sansa took her like a bitch, over and over, returning each snarl and slap Ornela made with one of her own, digging puple bruises with her grip whilst her long fingers made Ornela yelp and moan into Dany's cunt. Dany never crested, Ornela's focus was gone too soon and Sansa was deep in some animal place, only able to fuck herself and her prize into exhaustion. Whatever blood-burning jealousy filled her friend Ornela that night, it was purged by morning, wrung out along with her sweat, her juices and her screams.

Waking to see a grinning Sansa and a quiet, pacified Ornela were a worthwhile trade for a wedding night without her dear Sansa's fingers actually landing on Dany's skin. Dany got very little done that day, having finally seen what Sansa could do to a woman but not felt it.

Once their little lamb masters common, Westeros may have a third queen unless she learns of the pet name first and strangles the both of them.

"The cold not bother you. Is your home," Ornela reminds her. "Is known."

The Khal who had owned her seemed to have little use for her words, only her mouth and holes. 

She had forgotten the Lamb Men's tongue, she was stolen so young. Dothraki was uneven and alien in the poor woman's mouth and when they met. There really was no language in Ornela, just pieces and halves. Dany has taught her that, alone, a handful of words at a time. Missandei has taught her common, strange magical child she is, even with no place to hook it on. No point of reference.

Dany had never really believed Magister Ilyrio in Pentos. How could Westeros be home? Pentos was _comfortable_ if if that is only a child's overly-polished memory. The plains and camps on Great Grass Sea felt at the least like she _belonged_ with them and with her new people. That grand old city of Meereen _itched_ and bothered but whether the treachery or the place and climate she never decided.

 _Here,_ Dany decides. _This is home._

This strange land where half the year, no shutters or blankets keep her from waking covered in gooseflesh? Where the salt spray from the sea stings from the cold and the force alike? Where she wakes with fingers blue in the cold months if Sansa goes early for business and where in the warm months, she cannot shed enough blankets fast enough and it feels like the skin of the red-maned woman in her bed might set her on fire? Where a day never is simply comfortable?

This is home. Because her queen was born here. Because the cold doesn't bother Sansa in the least and amuses Ornela and because all the roads and tears led them here.

"Festival day," Ornela decides after a quick sniff of the wind.

"It is, Orry, yes. Or has been."

Ginger. Great bales of it, brought in at royal expense from the spoils of the broken Lannister and Baratheon houses. Woven in bundles around sticks and placed in the ashes of Kings Landing. Set aflame among the graves of a quarter-million who lived there and a full million buried there afterwards, a graveyard of known and unknown and marked and unmarked graves. Small and great folk alike.

It is all burned on one day, so that a nose-prickling smell of heat and spice wafts over the Kingdoms. 

The septons call it the Wind of Grief. Grief for the war dead, the loved ones who died and then had to be killed _again_ in the eighth Hell that the north became _._ Grief for the ones Cersei burned the moment Drogon's wings shadowed the Red Keep. She no doubt thought the fires would behave, stay only in Flea Bottom. Obey her, like everything else always had.

Grief for her son, sweet Viserion. Mother of Dragons indeed, she learned the moment the knife crossed the neck scales. Only mothers cry so and only a mother would dare such pain in order to ease another's.

Jon could capture a dragon and restrain it, brilliant and also half-witted and unwise man he is. Dany could free Viserion.

Red Cove and Black Keep are far enough south that she need not look at her failure each morning but not so far that she cannot smell it on the anniversary, carried over the mountains. Humility. Her map-makers say it had been a mason's camp once, fed and clothed by traders on two paths in the mountains barely wide enough for a large cart. The iron for the gates of the wall came from the range here, and the stone for the Red Keep from a strange and now gutted mountain at the south end. The peak had been sliced off in haste to appease Maekor the Cruel's need for a palace and no one cared much that it had been a volcano. Her maesters took three weeks to decide the mount was dead and done.

While hangers on and whore-mongers and wine merchants flocked to what would become her capital, Drogon burrowed in to the red mountain with flame and claw, melting a nest into the rock for herself.

The single, great tower of Black Keep that Dany ordered built sinks into the mountain it sits on -- easier to carve down than raise up, the masons said -- and was then hardened and shined by a momentary puff of dragon breath. It stands shiny and smooth as a polished obsidian knife and a buried river keep keeps it watered and cooler below in the servants and guest quarters. Smoke from the kitchens no doubt gives away the hidden part but it matters little. No stone in the world has that dark shine unless burned.

To look on that castle is to wonder how close the beast that made it prowls and how long the siege might last before she returns. The city benefits from mountains so shattered and jagged that most can not be walked two mean abreast for even the most skilled climbers and a pair of massive gates to rival what the Wall had once had. The mouth of the cove is narrow and the guard towers there can lift the chains in minutes either to keep ice floes from intruding in the more wicked winters or to keep unwanted ships out.

The Unsullied settled here and though they will father no sons, she suspects that the Dornish taking a liking to them means that bits will live on. Her descendants can reap the benefits of all this planning and hardening and scheming. She hopes that the reign of Daenerys I and Sansa the Red will be long and boring and known in the North and in the Kingdoms for their current aim of rebuilding farms and hamlets. She prays that an emboldened North swelled by wilding settlers who seem to make black and red-haired babies faster than rabbits and the kingdoms it left behind remain friends. Whether from her marriage or children or good judgment, she does not care. She wants to go down in the lineages as the last Targaryen to need to think of such bloody matters for longer than an afternoon inspection or changing of the gaurd.

The wind changes again and a dragon's roar splits the air, bouncing like thunder off of the cliffs. Drogon plunges into the sea past the mouth of the cove and comes back up with a fish close to the size of a whale in her jaws. Greyjoys call it a whale shark and Dany is never one to question their knowledge of the sea.

It struggles, gills so tall that a man could step into twitching helplessly before the teeth sink and it stills.

Drogon lands on the beach ahead, shaking every grain of sand, and begins to cook lunch. Hopefully another clutch of eggs is hardening inside her daughter, ready to nestle into the corners of the red mountain. She felt like a poor excuse for a Targaryen when a trembling, pudgy man explained to her how to tell a _draka_ and a _draga_ apart. Sam Tarley always has a place in her court for never repeating the story of such embarrassment.

Home. Because the cold bothers her but not Sansa and because Ornela finds it curious to live so far from where she was born, taken, and nearly broken with mistreatment. Because her dragons like it.

"Go home?" Ornela suggests.

"Home," Dany agrees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Westerosi delegation are going to help me leapfrog into the plot (such as it is) so they're getting a richer treatment right now.


	5. Locking up the house

**The Red Cove | Westeros**

(150 leagues from the site of King's Landing)

Ornela pauses inside the gate just long enough to slap her ash-gray stallion affectionately and hand him off to the stableboy. She reaches Dany's side with a few long strides of her lean, whiplike frame just as Tryion falls in on the other, huffing and stumbling under a stack of scrolls. 

Relative poverty compared to his previous wealth and something to do with himself suits Tyrion Lannister.

"Seven hells," Dany chuckles, swiping the box of quills and signet rings off the top.

"Thank you, your grace."

"Shame to break your nose if you tripped," she replies. 

"Yes, I just had it how I liked it, after all. I was considering another scar, just to keep things interesting."

Ornela huffs.

"Small man is like kid goat. Stubborn. Gets in everything."

"He'll take that as a compliment," Dany warns her.

"He already has."

Tyrion drinks still, but nothing like before. It will kill him no faster than old age now. She limited it sharply merely by sneaking all but the most ghastly wine into her private stash. Taste won out over need. She sent servants to throw cold water on him and change his sheets while the worst of it passed. Samwell Tarly was re-legitimized and relieved of his maester's chastity vow -- if not the work -- a fortnight later in thanks for the idea.

He whores still, and perhaps an ordinary queen might find it more offensive. It isn't as if Dany hadn't made her own meek requests during his various forays only to have eerily pale wildling and dark Summer Islanders show up in her own chambers. It isn't as if Dany hadn't had three black-haired girls in her bed two days before her wedding to Sansa before she lost her mind from worry. 

He writes and he reads, mostly and he talks more than five men do. With sobriety and access to a wet cunt two or four hours of the day rather than ten or twelve, he is the sort of advisor that can win a peace. Ten times less flattering and fifty times harder than winning a war. He misses almost nothing in dealing with her visitors, he settles squabbles of inheritance by remembering some empty castle on a road he saw once as a boy. Dany rules in a land she barely knows the shape of on a map and deals with nobles who lack many of the treacherous tools of the Mereenese but have half a dozen other, often worse sorts of humiliation than slavery they can inflict.

He uses what he jokes is his 'low view of the world' to see patterns in the noblemen who had ignored or mocked him even when he was the son of a lord. They are predictable, he assures her. Dany less so, though he's kind enough to inform her of her own ruts and grooves in thinking before habits get her men killed. 

If this man had been Hand of the King when she invaded, rather than an exile, Dany is not sure that she could have taken Westeros with anything but the cruelest use of her dragons. 

Dany sweeps through her office doors as soon as Grey Worm opens them for her. Tryion toddles behind her and Ornela pauses. Dany catches her wrist before her little lamb can pull back.

"Stay."

"I cannot read," she reminds Dany.

"Well," Missandei adds without looking up. "Yet. And she will."

Tyrion huffs. 

"Can you think? Speak? Have you spent more time in a Khalasar than anyone else here?"

"I...yes."

"Good. Because that's among the business today." He nods to a chair. "Go sit, please."

He did not add 'your grace' but he was not curt with Orry and he looked only at her while soothing her rather than looking to Dany for help.

Which suggests that Tryion knows. Probably along with everyone in earshot of the bedroom three nights past. He nods to the half a dozen chairs scattered at one end of the carved war table taken from Dragonstone. The end that represents the far north and where Dany, Sansa, and some mix of their family use in council meetings. Bran is beside the cluster in his wheeled chair and Arya is perched, hawklike and odd, in another. The more she ages into her looks the more she shows the blood of the First Men, lean limbed and iron-sinewed. The closer she is to being a woman grown, the more Arya resembles a hunting bird at the same time. Her nose fits her face and her messy black hair seems more at ease but mostly because her cheekbones cut a sharper profile and her jawline is hard and proud.

Not only is Arya not a lady but she seems not to even know how to operate a chair.

They have a word for it in pleasure houses in Yunkai, women who cannot sit properly and they're more often customers than whores but Dany is not eager to suggest it about Arya with her overprotective sister right beside Arya. Unable to admit such a possibility and liable to deny Dany's bed for three moons if she implied such a thing. At any rate, that woman, if she exists or if Arya is merely pining, is an islander somewhere on Arya's expeditions west of Westeros. Far away from the business at hand.

Sansa is in the middle and they rarely sit at the same ones twice. Any ambassador who wished to deduce the loyalties and love affairs of that end of the table by who sits where will be hard put to do so.

Ayra's idea, that time. 

Thus is her council seated. A dragon-riding madwoman, an assassin, a whoring dwarf, three horse-riding barbarians, a eunuch spymaster, a eunuch general, a buttery-bodied bookworm, a boy who thinks he's a raven, a pirate and for variety, a noble-born Westerosi lady.

"What is the business at hand?" Sansa asks before any of the usual introductions can be made.

"Ravens, firstly. Easily dealt with are marriage proposals. For the queen. For you."

He pats the tallest stack, then one shorter, but not egregiously so.

If Sana's pride is wounded by her smaller stack, it is drowned by the rage of the animal within. Calling her beloved a wolf or speaking of her having a wolf's bite is no mere figure of speech. It's as true about Starks as it is calling a Targaryen a dragon. The anger is no less quick or easier to tie back down. Given the fame of the line, unbroken and unchallenged from before even Valyria to Sansa's own lifetime, it's hard to know what is confidence, what is arrogance and what is the keen drive of in the first Stark to have to _retake_ Winterfell. No way to tell what what as in the blood was in nursemaid's rhymes and lessons on mother's knee.

"Seven hells," Sansa snarls. "Did you lie when you said you wrote them?"

Tyrion's mouth tilts in a sad, halfway smile.

"Every one. Many sent gifts, in fact. These lords wouldn't believe it if they snuck into your bedchambers and saw it, my queens."

"Perhaps we need smarter lords?" Dany jokes.

"We need less," Ornela grumbles. "One of four. Have khalasar."

Tryion chuckles. Then he shakes his quill in Ornela's direction.

"That is why she's here."

If Vayrs had been about to speak the complaint on his lips, he swallows it.

"Honesty. Our lords would drop like flies if they needed to defend themselves as often with their own wits and arms as Dothraki do, I've no doubt. Lines are all well and good. Usually, the man who founded the place and named it for himself managed it for a reason, after all. Starks show us how the blood carries the will and honor that raised the chieftain into a king in the first place. I'm loath to admit but the first Lannisters were cheats and fast-talkers when they weren't killers and I'm no better."

"It's when a bloodline goes on too long and shows nothing more than who bore what son that concerns me. If it's only a word, with no skills, sense or strength to back it, the word lord is a dangerous thing. In plenty, a few generations can pass without ruin but not in times like these. The wars and the lost crop gives us few luxuries and fewer chances for mistakes. Even with the winter breaking nearly before it starts every raven from the granaries suggests that hunger is at our heels, my ladies and lords." 

"Surely you're not proposing trial by combat to retain titles, Lord Hand?" Varys inquires. "Gods, you're not suggesting an execution? Over an unacknowledged marriage?"

Ayra has been twirling a metal rod between her fingers rather than a knife -- Grey Worm insisted she leave the knives in her rooms -- and this perks her up.

"I suggested a vote," Sam Tarly reminds them all. "Choosing, as the Iron Islanders do."

Yara laughs.

"I assure you our Kingsmoots are not so pretty as mainlanders think. At our best, perhaps but not lately. It's usually more a choice of who's _second_ strongest if I'm honest. Choosing to shit on so that the other one doesn't cut your throat."

She wraps her big hand around the throat of the Dornish tart on her lap and squeezes playfully, making the doomed thing shivering her silks. Yara at once spiked Dany's curiosity in the charms her own sex and convinced her that whoever she chose could not be _Yara_ or anyone quite like the hulking stallion of a queen. Unquestions monarch of an island that normally uses women like breeding stock.

"Not that," Tyrion agrees. "The Kingsmoots arose over nearly as long a time as the Iron Islands themselves. Rip the familiar away from people too fast and you have cornered beasts. Beasts bite the hand that feeds them, sometimes for no reason."

"Something gentler. Settled between nobles, as things usually are. Perhaps a tax," Dany suggests. 

"No. A change in tax. Lords pay the taxes and my quill," she says with a tap.

"Chooses the rates. Pick lords who have no business with each other usually, have them visit each other at festivals. Inquire after the affairs of house and lands socially. Varys, I want your little birds to fill in the gaps. We'll invite problems to visit and explain themselves. If not rectified, I increase the taxes until such time as their reports on grain, farms, and the septons blessing babes who live to see their name-days get better."

"They can choose to make use of the lands, servants, and inheritances they have to pay them in the promise of lower taxes to come as a reward. Lower taxes in years when they've learned how to make _more_ in the first place."

"Or they'll take it from the peasants, like always," Varys reminds her. "Hire raiders. Rape women to make more babies. We might be punishing the wrong folk."

"The worst will, yes. And your birds will tell us as much."

Arya quits playing with the rod.

"Oh. Give them a last chance, not to lose it?"

Dany nods.

"And if I attaint them and they don't step down surely _someone_ like you can deal with it. Even if they fancy themselves a match for Grey Worm's Unsullied and Orry's riders, the threat of Drogon will keep them from rank stupidity."

Varys blows out a long breath.

"It can work but to work right, it has to be both visible and invisible so that we can prove the cause but they can't catch the knife coming for their back. There would need to be books kept. Ledgers. So that one lord could not claim we had murdered his cousin for no reason. Witnesses for the books, perhaps judges hired from the Iron Bank. Writs to strip titles. Scapegoats, if it came to murder. Nothing quite like it has ever happened."

"Well, my dear spider, the dead never _walked_ until our lifetime. Dragons never flew over a city and didn't _raze_ it to ash until our lifetime."

He smiles.

"True."

"It is so ordered," Dany tells MIssandei.

Dany puts her head in her hands.

"Someday, if we get through one of these without something that rips up ten centuries of tradition, I'll be amazed."

Sansa smiles, lifting her blue eyes to catch Dany's violet ones.

"In the spring, I think. It will happen on a nice spring day, that meeting."

"We could hold these twice a moon in the spring months," Arya suggests, taking a mouthful out of a pear fruit she produced from somewhere on her person.

"Better odds," she adds with a full mouth.

\-----

"If there's nothing else," Dany sighs. "My queen and I have an announcement. We will be going away, perhaps a moon, perhaps longer. Drogon will accompany me as will half of the eggs in the vault. Tyrion, if he agrees. I will spare you secrets you cannot benefit from but it is for the good of the kingdom and the Stark line."

Tyrion is just standing there like a bag filled with straw.

_About time I surprised him for a change._

"Grey Worm. Keep order in the kingdom. Bran and Yara, rule and sit over disputes. Arya, keep the estate up. You've a good way with the servants, I've noticed. Admirable trait. Also, keep that odd cutthroat of Tyrion's out of the city. If he comes again for imagined debts, you have my blessing to gut him and put him in the harbor."

"Oh gods," he groans. "He didn't. Tell me he didn't. I swear, I paid Bronn eight years ago."

"I believe you. But not for your sister's promises to kill you," Dany reminds him. "Lannisters and debts and all that."

"Bronn snuck in again three nights ago," Grey Worm huffs. "Broke three of my men's hands."

Dany looks around.

"Some of the people at this table leave, some remain. Drogon vanishes from the sky. Unsullied drill as always, bloodriders range and horses graze, as always. Flags fly and men march and crops grow and with the Seven's blessing the world simply _goes on_ until we return and no one takes liberties to attack. If we can do that, we prove our notion that we can rule Westeros without further bloodshed."

"And if they do attack?" Varys asks. "I wish I could say it was long odds but it's not."

"Then this city will hold and when I return I will be ready for bloodshed. We prove a different notion."

She stands and leaves, having learned from one meeting with Olenna Tyrell the value of presenting crisp words and leaving them the back of her head rather than a chance to reply.

Tyrion scrambles along behind Dany and Orlena like a puppy worried he'll be left behind. Sansa catches up too, having to carry her longer dress. She looks like she wants to pick him up by the scruff of his neck and turn him around.

"Not that every activity in the royal bedchambers should ever be mine to know," he huffs. "But Seven Hells! What is this?"

"Mind your thoughts, if not your words," Dany reminds him.

"Think carefully of my wife's good intentions and speak twice as carefully," Sansa hisses. "Remember that she's _good_ and does things for a reason."

He points down the stairs towards the council chamber.

"They need you!"

"They need leadership, not me. A service. One which I currently provide. No creature lives forever. Not even a dragon does, so far as we know."

He sighs.

"Testing. You're testing them to see if they can live when you've passed."

Dany smiles.

"Or if I want to relax for a winter. Or if I take sick for three moons, or anything of the sort. Mostly, I'm taking my wife to someone who can try to help me put a baby in her."

"Oh gods, not a witch. If you're seeking a witch's help, lie to me I beg it. My sister had the worst luck with woods witches."

"As did I," Dany hisses. "Not a witch. Not as such."

Dany pulls a key from her bodice to match the one Sansa has and puts it in the lock. Both turned, they can push open the door to their chambers.

"Come along," Sansa chortles. "Temptations await."

"You know my weaknesses," he whines. "And since the women involved aren't the offer nor the wine you snuck away...it's a mystery."

Dany dips her head in a nod.

"How very perceptive, Lord Hand."

He follows.

Dany collected strange artifacts over the years, some at her marriage to Khal Drogo, some she found glinting in the dirt in places only the eyes of someone on dragonback would catch the shine.

"Watch," Ornela orders.

She approaches a rough-carved mirror made of blue glass that had been in some Dothraki cache and that Dany stumbled over on patrol near Mereen. It was a decoration until Ornela threw a grape at it one day and it never returned.

Ornela lilts and cries out in an old Dosh Khaleen chant and knocks at four different points on the mirror. The glass hisses and gathers lightning to it like smoke.

"Follow, if you dare..." Sansa teases, stepping through.

"FUCK!" he shouts, waddling around to look behind the mirror.

He runs his hand along the back and comes away with only dust.

"Where did she go?"

"He'll catch on. I'll stay in case he wants to be let out," Dany tells Ornela.

She grabs Orry hand and pulls her close, kissing her before she can speak a goodbye that won't a goodbye anyway. Might as well confirm Tryions suspicions, to take a least some mercy on the man.

"Is a baby your purpose here?" he asks, his stubby arms folded.

"In large part. Beyond that games and drinking. We've made some friends, speaking to that mirror late at night. Others like me and Sansa. One invited us to come drink and eat, game and carouse. It may take a moon or two, as it usually does, to get a child."

"Is there a reason I should accompany you in this madness? One you can admit to?"

Dany shrugs.

"Wonders no maester laid eyes on. Wines and brandy of sorts no man ever drunk. I am told their daughter has a harem unlike any that has ever walked the earth."

Tyrion grins.

"Not always so different, are we?" he jokes.

"Aside from your fear of heights, no."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yara Greyjoy would totally bring a fuckbuddy to a work meeting. Arya could be straight and she can Gendry were cute but I find the idea of awkward, weird, murder-hobo and lesbian Arya funnier. I like that as being the reason she never fit in well with the southern ladies: she's a tomboy "sports" lesbian sister and Sana's the femme sister.


	6. Waking the Lich - Part 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shepard and Liara adopted two children in the post-war years, roughly seventy years before their first biological child was born. Adopted less than a year apart, they were raised -- and act like -- human twins down to the pranks and finishing sentences. 
> 
> Artemis T'Soni was rescued as a newborn infant from the rubble during the aftermath of the failed mission to Thessia to stop Cerberus and was taken in on the Normandy by the couple.
> 
> Syane-Ika T'Soni was a teenaged Prothean found in stasis in what is believed to have been a royal Necropolis. She had lost many of her memories to a pre-stasis injury and as such, had not suffered through any of the Prothean-Reaper war at an age she could have understood it. Shepard and Liara raised her in Asari culture, treating the Prothean empire more academically. They hoped she might feel less isolated as one of three living female Protheans and did not want her to read others of her race who _had experienced_ the war and gain secondhand memories of trauma.  
> \-----  
> Mass Effect Canon Divergences:  
>  **#1**  
>  Asari Justicars, now led by Samara, have relaxed controls around the Ardat-Yakshis in the context of their own greatly depleted numbers, the destruction of the monastery and two Ardats undetected by the order who laid down their lives for a Turian colony in the War. This relaxing of censorship and religious oversight over the problem has led to doctors having access to patients and investment with a wider field of legally permissible studies. Work is ongoing into allowing Ardats to lead normal lives, including melds and sex, without risking the typical spiral into an addiction to biotic rape and murder.
> 
>  **#2**  
>  Typically, reproductive-aged Asari outside of relationships or unwilling to raise children take hormone suppressants that both reduce the body's ability to form embryos and partially block deeper-level melding. Much as human contraceptives trick the body into thinking it's pregnant, these trick the Asari into thinking she's _sated_ and recently melded with a partner, satisfied, and thus dimming the reflex to meld and map genetics. This makes unintentional conception less likely per-encounter.
> 
> During a relationship, these are usually abandoned in favor of the full psychological benefits of the mind-reading and shared consciousness, in and outside the bedroom. Given that reproduction is an act, not a process, giving into the urge to want a child in one's mind, true contraception by artificial means other than surgery is impossible. The drugs lower the urge, not block the mechanism. It remains a matter of willpower just with a thumb on the scale.
> 
> Sudden withdrawal from the meds (low-grade euphorics) is like crashing off of anti-depression medications. It leads to intense mood swings, headaches, and dizziness along with a spike in libido as the body instinctively seeking to replace the pseudo-neurotransmitters it thought were those of a life partner with those of an actual meld. The brain is feeling the chemical signature of a breakup: a loss of constant baseline levels of pleasure hormones naturally gained only through romantic, sexual and domestic partnering.
> 
>  **#3**  
>  Javik, as hinted in the game, searched out the last graves of his unit so he could join them by ritual suicide. In the process, he uncovered dozens of Necropolis facilities and bunkers. He transmitted the location of each to Liara and Shepard. As Shepard had the Codex and was the only living being who spoke the language and Liara the cultural knowledge, they were the only ones who could check them. Across tens of millions of pods, a handful of highly-prioritized pods remained, perhaps nobles or significant personnel. This results in a current Prothean population of roughly nineteen, the vast majority of them male. the obvious importance placed on their lives has led to a nasty squabble for control of the genetic indexes of the royal family to indicate who is the current emperor. 
> 
> Officially. 
> 
> Unofficially it seems to be Prothean males taking a shot at usurping the throne for the first time in eons, assuming Liara's interpretation of gendering of the indexes is correct.  
> \-----  
> AUTHOR'S NOTE:  
> Shepard and Liara, in the games, would have had no idea whether Shepard would live to see any 'little blue babies' grow up and Earth-raised lesbian Shepard would have grown up on a pop-culture diet of 20th and 21st-century sitcoms about two moms and their adopted kids. Female-female options at reproductive clinics didn't exist until the 22nd century and even then, were rare. The money needed to access one would have been beyond the comprehension of a street rat like pre-enlistment Shepard.
> 
> Liara would have changed Shepard's idea of having a family but most likely not replaced it entirely and they're softies...they adopted war orphans.

* * *

SIXTY-ONE YEARS AGO 

* * *

  
**Thessia (Asari homeworld) | Armali city-state**

**Armali University | Silver Wind Dormitory Complex | Room 1837**

The vid link crackles to life and Artemis' head snaps up, blinking away the sudden burst of light.

"Huh?" she groans.

Her mouth is sour and tacky and her crests hurt worse than the time when she caught herself nearly melding with a girl on the first date in the back of a ruined car on a human colony and banged her head into a concrete wall in surprise.

If an Asari could get a hangover, she'd blame that. They can't...not in this sense. Shep will 'clock it' immediately, snapping into a set of postures, movements, and tones of voice that she doesn't even know she has. Buried too deep. At the first hint that something's wrong, she'll dig into the mix of training and thoroughbred instincts that it takes for a human soldier plus one former archaeologist with limited social skills to waltz through ruins that commando teams died in. 

Forgetting how it works and recognizing _human_ alcohol poisoning symptoms, Shep will ask if she's been drinking.

That's when Liara will chime in, reminding her that's not quite how hangovers are _'honey'_ and telling that story about Solstice. Before spotting one of her own bad habits and crashing down on it with a lecture so unstoppable it might as well be the Reapers...except they _could be_ stopped in the final estimation.

Answer. Admit she hasn't had a bite or a drink of water in four days, be surrounded by a literal army of 'aunties' of four different species and overprotective 'uncles' of two others by the second sunset. 

That's Good Plan.

Bad Plan is not to answer. Bad Plan involves either official (Shep) or unofficial (Liara) investigations into her entire life here and either polite, uniformed and obvious bodyguards (Shep) or incredibly sketchy (Liara) but mostly invisible shadows until they're convinced she's safe.

Maybe even Uncle Wrex visiting.

_Aunt Karin is going to kill me when she hears...hopefully._

She asked her mothers for one gift when she went to college. They did _not_ disappoint, even if a handheld QEC connection was as much for them as for her. The quality is shit but what's important is it's instant. If Liara gasps, or groans, or rolls her eyes at Shep as an image _here_ in her hand, the other half did so at that exact moment most of a galaxy away. It's monochrome. Grayish-white and scratchy, hideous resolution compared to anything commercial. Officially, it probably doesn't exist and judging by the mix of stout Quarian plating and clearly Geth-inspired fluidic power connectors, it wouldn't have existed before the war.

They just stare at each other for a while. It hurts. She's here. She's following in the footsteps when she could be back home, reading, wearing dirty clothes because she forgot to change them not because she apparently picked up the human habit of going to college without learning how to _wash one's own clothing_ and if it feels like she's a half-trainable pyjak, she probably deserves it.

She fumbles for the answer button.

"Hi, moms."

"Hi, little lamb."

"Hi, little one," Liara adds. She'll never be 'little wing' and Arty knows this. She's not sure she wants to be. Not with the way her mother deflates whenever she says it.

"Moms? Mom and dad? You never told me. Which is it?"

"Mom and dad's good," Shepard tells her. "I...heh. Even then I thought about being happy, daydreamed about it, I never exactly thought _dad_ would be an exactly appropriate term for me. I mean, we puny earth lesbians usually adopt or I guess the rich use fertility clinics so..."

"Hey!" Artemis complains. "I'm adopted!"

"Yeah. Even that would typically be 'other mom' but I spotted you in the wreckage. Initiating mother or as humans call it 'dad' so yeah, dibs."

Liara shoots her wife a look that truly belongs in a hall of fame somewhere.

"Dibs? She's not yours, she's _ours_ , you towering twat!"

Liara's halfhearted slap lands even lighter and less convincingly than her Irish accent by osmosis or the curses that come with it. Forty years on, Liara learned to curse without blushing.

"Remind me. Which one of us took a crash course of _hormone treatments_ to nurse her?"

"Right," Shepard says, pointing a finger at Liara on the transmission. 

"Mom stuff," she whispers.

"Remind me," her mother says with acidic calm and a stiff thumb to her own temple to push some building headache back in. "Which one of us had to split battlefield reports and _breastfeeding_ in the last seven weeks? Which one of u-"

Liara's throat trembles and locks up. Shepard is all over her, gathering her up and pressing her cheek against Lara's neck folds.

"Shh. Li, no no no. I'm here. I'm always going to be here. You saved her. I came back. We did good."

"So, shall we put mom and dad in the minutes and go from there?" Arty jokes.

"Yes," Liara sniffs. "Heh. She tells your jokes. Unfortunately. Thank you for letting your mother make a fool of herself, Artemis."

"Anytime."

"How are you settling in?" Shep asks.

Arty turns the device in her hands to show off the room. Serrice would've taken her in a split second. Serrice would probably have offered her a matriarch daughter's hand in marriage if it got the name T'Soni back into their notable students list. Serrice would probably kill people to make sure she left with a perfect grade average and a desire to work with the recruiting board of the alumni. Neither her mothers nor Arty wanted that. Armali are Serrice's main cultural, academic and political rivals. Most importantly, their loathed waveball rivals.

Here, she's famous for her last name but not on an easy path because of it.

"Untidy," she admits.

"That's adorable," Shepard chortles. "That's beyond tidy, honey. For civilian life, it's damn near surgical."

"Wait, what? This looks _noth-_ "

Liara laughs softly.

"Nothing like the room of a woman who in thirteen years barely used anything but the desk?" she jokes. "If you'd ever seen my room at Serrice, you'd assume it was simply unoccupied. At least if I had the study pod folded up"

"Or dad's," Arty mumbles.

"Dad's picture, if you're thinking of the one I am? That is from an _inspection_ of the barracks, little lamb. Final stages officer qualifications, I think. My grade on that exam was entirely based on the tidy."

Shepard laughs so hard Liara swats her again. Unbecoming a matriarch, let alone a T'Soni and exactly how human couples married sixty years act and so _them_ it makes Artemis' ribs ache.

"Human soldiers are big on ceremony. It makes us feel important, I suppose."

Liara scoffs.

"And each one of the commandos in training back home probably spends more time fucking than most human armies did," Liara grumbles. "Do _not_ date a commando, sweetling."

"What, don't make your mistake?" Shep asks.

The unbreakable woman looks wounded at the merest hint that Liara regrets anything.

"You're human, darling. Doesn't count...and no, not you. Twenty, no...close to thirty years before I met you. She was older and I was too young, really, for anything with a partner. Let alone an older partner like her. Nezzy caught us and sent me back to my room. Suppose she gave the poor thing one look that had her scrambling for one-way passage to Omega. Given that it wasn't much as sex went, never again. I'd resigned myself to being a lone fish when I met you."

"I promise, mom. No commandos. No _archaeologists_. No one scary."

Shep laughs. Loud, honest, real. The sound that terrifies Thessian aristocrats because they _need her_ and they _owe her_ and she's _looked up_ to and one doesn't live a thousand years without being able to smell the winds of change.

"S'fair. Archaeologists scare me," she whispers. 

"Funny you say that about the commandos, Li. I hadn't thought of that. Though I suppose that for most of human history, it's usually the civilian women in the area the army swept through that got fucked senseless and, I'm afraid, not usually by choice. At least the asari had the common sense to evolve only one gender so that pent-up soldiers didn't see civilians as a different animal when they encountered them."

Liara rolls her eyes.

"More a matter of the asari are better at self-defense when naked and renegotiating terms of a sexual encounter on the fly."

_They're just...arguing. They didn't call to ask anything in particular._

"You just called over dinner, didn't you?" Artemis laughs. "This is just like two days ago. Just with me here rather than there in person."

"Busted."

"Shadow Broker's daughter indeed," Liara purrs.

The door behind her bangs open and a hum and a chorus of voices spills into the room along with light from the hallway. A twang like a steel lyre-string that indicates air rushing into the gap that a biotic move emptied echos around the room and is followed by disappointed groans.

"Hi, Syane. You all right sis?"

"Yes, thank the goddess," Syane groans, sinking to the carpet. "THESE GIRLS ARE INSANE!"

"Go sit with your sister, please, little lamb."

"Sure."

Artemis kneels down and holds the QEC between them. Syane's eyes are wide, wet and glassy. 

"Why didn't you tell me, mother?" Syane moans.

"Tell you what? Oh."

Liara sighs.

"Did they pressure you because you're Prothean? Honestly, I don't think that more than six people know what Protheans looked like. No statues left. We raised you, you're ours. We treated you as asari and human and just loved you," she admits. "Never really thought about it. I..."

Their mother sighs.

"I suppose that we thought you would just seem novel to the other girls there. Not so much that they would be rude about it. Part of the college maiden experience, my dears."

"Being novel," Syane groans. "Especially _genetically_ novel, from a rare species, is a bad thing to be in the dorms during a hormone suppressant shortage. The whole pack of them came up to me after class, just humming with biotics. Flirting, laughing, not really pressuring, I suppose. On the one hand being nice and on the other just being right in my space. Three of them tailed me home despite all of your best tricks for losing a tail and a couple of my own. They all lived here though. Tiny bit less creepy. I don't actually think they knew I was Prothean, just that I was different than their other partners. Whether or not I was the last one in the package, they wanted a bite."

"Ouch," Shep mutters. "Pharma-bot software failure is one thing but it's been sixty years. It's the _homeworld_ and this is a key medical and mental health need. To get to the point of widespread _withdrawal_? Kickback sickness? We'd heard it was bad..."

_They worried I'd run out, they mean._

Liara rushes into the gap before Artemis can feel too judged.

"Artemis, we don't me-"

"Why do you think I've attended all my classes _virtually_ so far?" Arty grumbles. "I've got enough for my whole study here but, still. Don't want someone thinking with her azure and trying to start a meld and me having to use a throw to keep her back."

"It's okay, mom. You're allowed to worry about that. I'm a suppressed Ardat-Yakshi and we need to get used to saying it without blushing. I'm not scared of that part of me."

"Doctor T'van is optimistic about the new implants, and the new drugs, and hell, some kind of weird biofeedback gloves she had been drawing on a scratchpad at my last visit. The Justicar they assigned is younger than I am and she's watching me like a hawk but she hasn't done anything because I haven't. She hasn't even tightened up to where I can catch her tail. She _thinks._ If she looks like she's tightening the noose, I'll bug out and come home. Of all the bad things that could have happened to me for being your daughter, genetic or otherwise, I'll take the goddess-fucked Ardat chromosomes any day."

Two big, soft, damp hands curl around her wrists. Four eyes seek out hers, yellow and damp and _pleading_ and Goddess it is somehow worse than being pouted at with just two, Shepard's right.

"Please," Syane pleads. "I need to read, meld, whatever you want to call it. Be outside my head. With anyone but _them_."

Artemis glances, panicked, at her mother and father.

"Sis, I might..."

"Hurt me?" Syane scoffs. "Doubt it. The fact that my ancestors were here messing around with your ancestor's tribes back when Ardats were vastly more common suggested they probably had it cracked. I'll just give you a dark energy nudge if it burns, sound good?"

Her left hand darkens from pale green to jet black and the air snap-freezes around her disruption field.

"Just," Syane sniffs. "I want to be normal. I want to have had a bad day and my twin sister melds for a while so I can experience her day. Live through half of a _good day._ Please."

Shepard nods.

"You're careful and your sister's tough. You've play-melded with her who knows how many times when you were little. Before we even had a diagnosis. You won't hurt her. You can't. You wouldn't even know how to, little lamb."

Arty exhales.

"Right, Sy. So...yeah. Let's...hmm. I want to make sure you have that hand up, on my throat. Just in case. I'm just going to hold your head, ok?"

"Yeah," Sy whispers. "At the flare, like when we were kids. Please."

"Can you leave it on, little lamb? So we can see both our girls?" Shepard pleads.

* * *

FIFTY-SEVEN YEARS AGO

* * *

**Thessia (Asari homeworld) | Armali city-state**

**Armali University | Silver Wind Dormitory Complex | Room 1837**

_Fuck,_ Arty thinks. _Stupid QEC._

She wonders if it has an audio-only mode and then realizes if it ever did, Liara rigged an override.

"S'okay, gorgeous," Melissa mumbles. "Answer it."

The blonde human's small thrown over her middle is light and warm. It feels fluffy with that uniquely-human quality of _hair_ and it's been six hours after the lifting of legal bans on Ardats having sex and five of those have been spent in her classmate's arms. She's confident on the face and it's Calculus 18 or Xenocultural Arts 67. It's either a math or art course, she's pretty sure.

Goddess, it was _her turn_ after fifteen years of nudging aside suitors of every race except Asari, plus some who hadn't divined or heard the rumors. Not to mention those more interested in a roll in the sheets than marrying into the Peeresses. She's almost sixty-five, quite young for the old rules but now? That's well past the age for that first stupid, laugh-it-off attempt. Lots of opinion writers call it a bad influence. A byproduct of the short-lived, high-energy humans. They don't acknowledge that this means Asari culture adjusted to humanity and human intermarriage in a way it didn't for Salarains or Vorcha who they've known for centuries longer and who don't even live a fourth as long as a human.

"Hi, mom and dad."

"Well!" Shep chortles. "I was just calling to ask how you were handling the announcement but, seemingly you're handling it well."

"Or, just dad, apparently. Hi."

"Who's the girl?" her dad jokes.

"Melissa."

"Melanie, actually," the girl behind her yawns. 

_Shit, really?_

"Hi, female voice calling itself dad I can't see! I'm behaving, promise!"

She waves.

"The hand you can't see is totally not hiding because it's on a boob!"

"She's funny, I like her."

"Good lord," Melanie mumbles. "Someone ought to win a bloody Nobel Prize for putting you lot back on the field."

"You lot?" Shepard inquires, stiffening a bit.

"Ardat, right?" Melanie asks after a yawn. "I hoped when we met at the club. About the time the orgasm ripped my brain into confetti and it felt like I died but somehow I wasn't scared since she had me and I knew I hadn't? I was sure."

Melanie chuckles and snuggles in closer, wrapping a hand around Arty's breast that feels less welcome than it did an hour ago.

"So you didn't know who I was? Remember the class we're in?"

"Does it matter? You're cute. You're different. _Smell_ dangerous, at least. I like different and I live for that sort of fake danger stuff. Used to be really into vampire books as a girl. You are an Ardat, right? I mean, hell, given how good you are I wouldn't care but...that was my guess when I saw you."

_Wanting my last name, that's something. Not great, not nothing either. Wanting an Ardat? Going out looking for an Ardat as the key trait? The fuck is her damage?_

What follows that thought is a whirlwind. Arty doesn't remember most of it. 

The yelling? Begging? That was Melanie. 

The stony, flat tone, telling Melanie to get out of her sight? That must have been her dad.

Meaning she's the one who did the crying.

\-----

"What the fuck just happened, dad?" Artemis finally croaks.

If there was a day-night cycle on that wacky space station her mom settled the family in, it's probably gone full circle while Shep stayed her, patient as could be, listening to her sobs.

"Whew," Shep exhales. "Kind of a rite of passage, for human lesbians."

Arty sniffs.

"When she's on my case about this sort of thing, Mom always says I'm the bluest human dyke who ever lived. Do tell."

"She only does that because she can't help with gaydar and labels," Shep reminds her. "Not because she judges you. She put aside a marriage fund before _Normandy_ made the relay to the forward staging point. She put it in your name with one hand she held you in the other. Tripled the input when you were diagnosed. She's proud of you, including the fact that you maybe carry yourself more like Aria T'loak or me and maybe are going to get married in a suit, not a dress."

"For your mom, it's a blind spot. Try and remember that by the time she knew that human women existed, humans were already self-sorting, especially queer women. The ones making a point of being in Asari circles _were_ the queer ones and if they weren't looking for partners, they were looking for the atmosphere, or to raise kids in female spaces...which, you were very kind to let us gender-crazy humans assume that. Very patient in waiting so long to be irritated. I'm not stereotyping there."

"Two years in to my tour as a Lieutenant and just after general resettlement options opened for Thessia and Illium, I processed three discharge papers for ladies in my unit in one month. Saw an exit code I didn't recognize, called a fleet clerk. Took a while but she found hundreds more. The slot on the form was marked other and the other field was filled in the same. I concerned a marine and learned that Mike-Tango-Tango-Foxtrot-Sierra stood for Moving to Thessia for Sex."

"Human women are truly efficient," Arty teases. "That saves about three dozen letters."

"We don't live long and queers don't really get to _live_ until twice as old as most folks unless their family wraps them in so much love they do all the stupid teenager stuff _as a teenager_ so yeah, we are in a hurry."

"Even if Liara had friends back then, they would have been asari or else humans else soaking up the atmosphere. Living with you blue angels, your amusing lack of labels, and the less tightly wound ask-and-answer flirting style? Where two women holding hands isn't just normal, it's in every piece of ancient art? I can't really tell you how much it affected me, Arty. It was in a vid but when I saw the Hall of Matriarchs, all those portraits? Saw who built that civilization? Who loved them?"

Arty watches her father's smile grow slowly, like a seed becoming a plant.

"I knew that it was where I'd belong. Where I'd live when I was discharged. Where I'd be buried, someday. Plan was to get married to someone woman-shaped at some point the middle, human or alien, wasn't sure about that detail at the time. So I doubt any of the religious haters pulled up roots to move to Thessia or hell, even the Citadel. There are straight women in Asari space but they're the ones willing to be there. On the Citadel it made the news back when if C-Sec got involved because someone lost their shit and threw a punch about being approached."

The next, unshared memory brings a laugh and somehow is so inappropriate that Artemis isn't "old enough" for it.

"Anyhow. Melanie was a Mark I ESG, as we navy dykes called them. Experimenting Straight Girl. It's a nearly universal experience for Earth lesbians."

"My what?"

"Oh, that's when a girl likes you but not _you,_ just the _idea_ of being gay. It's actually really common in college, which is the age you're at. She's away from her parents, she thinks she might be gay or bicurious and wants to make sure she is. Or make sure she is not, really. Typically goes that way. She wants to try the identity on like it's a hat because she thinks can take it back off later. You can't. She keys in on your openness about your sexuality. Saves her time to pick someone she's confident is lesbian. There are humans who don't have that experience I suppose but...

"I'm so sorry you had to go through it. You tend to be naked and happy and thinking about the L word and the girl who made you that way is in a completely different headspace. Even panicking. It hurts like hell, my girl."

"So she probably is queer but wanted me in particular because I fit some fantasy. Like I wasn't a _person,_ " Arty moans.

"Yeah, sorry. Not an exact match but closest I can think of. Not seeing you as a whole-ass person is kind of the essence of it, kiddo. Shame. I'm guessing if she remembered you from class, or even wanted the fame thing..."

Shep trails off so Arty can think.

"...I'd have been okay. At least been okay with starting out there."

Shep nods.

"Dad? Who was yours? Not mom, clearly. Kenzi?"

_Mom wouldn't be so torn up about it that she has a scrubber on her omnitool removing 'Mackenzie' from news article bylines._

Shep chuckles.

"No, not Kenzi. That was real, even if it ended badly. Ashley. Not _the Ashley,_ not Aunt Ashley but a different Ashley. From back in Officer Candidate School. Ashley Williamson."

"You and mom really just need to make friends with different names slash initials someday."

"Yeah, I know we do. Karen's a gimme. Lots of women named Karen with an E rather than an I like Chakwas. I know a Rex, a Tali--that's with a Y--and three Samanthas and hell, I know a person who's _first_ name is Traynor. Just in the humans. In those who aren't family. Which is kooky now that I put it together. Get some rest, little lamb. There will be another. Who wants the whole of Artemis Benezia T'Soni."

"Thanks mom."

"I said rest, little lamb. ESGs tire you out."

"Baa," Arty jokes.

"Baa..."

* * *

FIFTY-ONE YEARS AGO 

* * *

**Thessia (Asari homeworld) | Tescani continent, sub-polar forests**

**Underwater Dig Site, continental shelf**

(168 meters below sea level, 20 meters from shore)

The water is cold, clear, dark and for every bubble coming up from the half-frozen seabed, there's a northern tribal myth to go with it.

Syane's communicator bracelet blinks and she pushes the acknowledge symbol. "This theory of yours is crazy, sis."

Arty's synthesized voice in her ear is accompanied by her effortless-looking approach. 

Her face is sealed up reflexively, just as it would be in vacuum or near-vacuum and she's been taking brief sips from her breather. Her pupils are blown out and she's been catching things that Syane can't spot without the night-vision visor. 

Were it not for the glucose coming off the bed of thermo-synthetic plankton below them, this salty-sweet water would have been ice an eternity ago. Even for Protehan physiology, long honed as predators and genetically enhanced for thousands of years to be killers, it's truly punishing. Arty looks so at ease that she's probably figuring out how to take her mousy little civil engineer girlfriend down here and fuck her against the rock shelf for a lark. How the asari ever convinced anyone that they _weren't_ descended from aquatic hunters in ancient times, she has no idea. Give that it escaped the Prothean records her mother shared from the expedition to Thessia, they've been convincing liars for a long time.

Syane taps a reply back, then freezes.

Right there. Right in the rock.

Syane smiles and some primitive fish sees _teeth_ and doesn't care what planet the owner was bred on, scurrying away into a crevice.

She flicks her light at it to indicate it to her sister. Following a brief scan of the weed-covered door, she takes out an omnigel dispenser and works on dissolving the seal. With a gentle pull field, it comes out clean and Arty helps her maneuver it into a safe flat spot on the rocks.

Inside the cave is air, bioluminescent fungus and _raw cold_ that has new features like drafts and shifting air currents that make the ocean seem mild.

"Underwater tombs prove nothing," Arty grumbles. "Other than that I should never have let Uncle Wrex talk us into the _Indiana Jones_ vids."

"Because everyone knows that Lake Bisel is where the sword of the first Justicar was buried," Syane scoffs. "And common knowledge and six thousand years of searching and finding nothing mean it just has to be a tiny bit deeper."

"No, because the myths of Malari Canon are the propaganda of fascist lunatics. Not to mention we're nine leaps of faith past those."

"Fascists usually steal their myths for their propaganda. Less work. Earth's Nazis stole Norse themes, for example."

"That seems a stretch to generalize from that to here."

"Humor me, sis. So the Malari Canon glorifies Ardat-Yakshis, assigns them mythical status. Generals. Sorceresses. Death goddesses, practically. A fascist regime from the _equator_ celebrates a genetic anomaly more common, even slightly, here, in the _polar_ populations. Why?"

"Again, propaganda. Dark legend. Do what the secret police says or the witch from the cold water place is going to rip your brain out through your azure."

"But why _that_ and not their empresses? Not their actual bloodlines? Why would egotists and eugenics freaks lionize infertile killers? Sorry, no offense."

Arty shrugs.

"In this case, none taken."

Syane taps her fingers to the wall, just below a pictograph. One female standing over a kneeling crowd.

"Because they were useful, sis. This matches a script we have in some old Justicar records captured from a Malari stronghold. Walk with me. Tell me what you see."

"Queen, over her subjects. She's maiden and they're matron stage, by the shapes."

"Queen, standing over a mass grave."

"Queen, using magic to defeat a monster."

Syane looks back along the short hallway.

"What I see, is this: Ardat priestess, performing rites. Sacrifices. Lives being given by women who already had borne children. Same priestess, infused with repeated feeding using it to mimic implant-level biotics and slaying a... Goddess! Is that a _thresher maw?_ "

She nods at the monster inscribed. Arty leans closer.

"Fuck. Yeah, must be. The eggs can survive vacuum, cold and a solid impact. Asteroid strike might have knocked one loose from Tuchanka and onto a rogue planetoid. Maws are old enough as a species and Tuchanka is close enough to us in space that one could have drifted on a rock that got sling-shotted for some extra speed."

"Huh," Syana mutters. "Might be why the pedipalps are bigger but there's four and not three. Let's send that one to Wrex."

Artemis chuckles and sets up the higher-resolution scanner to map the complex.

"How big?" Syane asks.

"Not tomb big," Arty murmurs. "This place is _palace_ big. That," she points at the display. "Off to the north. Might be barracks. Or a pantry. Hard to say purpose from outlines. Bedchambers, or else that's the burial chamber. Way too many empty rooms to make sense."

"Told ya."

"This theory of yours, is, again, crazy. _Precursors and Alternatives to Malari Canon and the Negative Foundations of Ardat-Yakshi Representation in Pre-Spaceflight Thessia_? Even if they didn't think this was just you indulging your sick sister..."

Syane sighs.

"You're not sick. How many, sis?"

"Huh?"

"How many Asari girls have Ardat genes, either two or three clusters? All in and not just the symptomatic cases?"

"Two? One in a hundred. All three? Just over one in twenty-five, for purebloods."

Syane cracks a nutrient bar.

"Sis, that's a dextr-right. Prothean stomach."

"Perks," Syane chuckles. "Can't imagine how Quarians haven't conquered the galaxy," she opines, catching the crumbs in her palm. "I would. Just to make more. These are delicious."

"Fun fact. That's actually twice the number of humans--two percent--who are high enough on the sociopathic scale to perform excellently in combat. Who can take life quickly and without locking up. Not a desirable trait and yet spread evenly in humans. In fact, you'd think more settled, more peaceful societies would have stared to select against people who are comfortable with killing."

"They're young," Artemis chortles. "Give them time."

"Ardat-Yakshi, absent treatment, are either celibate and some sort of miserable or somewhere along a path between the first murder and the last. It's a nasty little trait to be so-well preserved in Asari genetics as a dead-end. Even despite purges and genophagic treatment attempts by post-Malari governments."

"So you're saying some level of Ardatism was allowed, accepted even? For combat purposes?"

"I'm saying it's _so fucking obvious_ that there would have been a place for them that I'm not surprised the Justicars shelved those drawings I found. More I dug, more I realized it was too many scrolls, books and statues to disappear and burning would have drawn attention. Pre-firearms? Pre-implant? If your tribe didn't have an Ardat warrior, feeding at least three or four times a year, the neighboring tribes who were willing to bear that cost would march in and wipe you out without breaking a sweat."

"Maybe they used willing volunteers. Maybe they used prisoners. Maybe they demanded tributes of virgins and these were the ones left over from the volcano. I don't know. That's the next paper I write."

"I only know that physically, a sated Ardat--including one with the treatments to prevent the killing part, like you--who has melded at all recently? She is a fucking force of nature. Now that we have decriminalized it and there are sexually active Ardats, honing the meld over time? We have an inkling of how _much_ more powerful that buzz makes you. Before the amps, they would have been the only _combat_ biotics possible. You blew out three military-grade amps the year after you lost your virginity."

"Two more since the day you met Nyra. You blew out one that dad needed a SPECTRE waiver to get you. Aldrin Labs on Earth makes the Dhampir-XXX model specifically for Ardats now with quad-chambered cores. No model ever needed that sort of redundancy. Because in a full spike, there's a split second where you just _push so much harder_ than other Asari. Because humans are anthropocentric bags of dicks, it comes in crimson and black casing even though they go under the skin, for crying out loud. Comes with a platinum amulet of some lesbian vampire character."

"Please tell me you didn't."

"Solstice present!" 

"The amp or..."

"Both. Me and dad."

"Goddess, I hate you."

"No, you don't."

"No, I don't."

Something makes a scraping sound up ahead. Stone on stone.

A new draft of air, stale and warmer than this chamber.

Breathing.

"Did you hear something?"

Syane nods. Her hand drops to her holstered Acolyte.

"Yeah. Not just a cavehopper, either. Something that reacted to our presence here."

"WHAT? This place has been seale-"

"And lined with huge clumps of moss," Syane reminds her. "Maybe edible."

"And _cold."_

"Someone just thrived for in ten hours in water three Celsius below freezing. Also, in the cold? It's obvious. You're in denial," Syane teases. "You are totally going purple as you finish growing up. Like great-grandmother and great-great-grandfather."

"And _alone._ "

"And _dark_ ," Syane adds. "And if that's who I'm _afraid_ it is, she's been here about forty-one thousand years now. Alone. Probably on the crazy side."

"She?"

"Yeah. Yasseni. Guardian goddess to an extinct local tribe. Except when I translated with more comparisons, I think it's a _title_ and not a divine being. This is that tomb. I think."

"How? This place is way too old. How the fuck is she alive?"

"Joshua Tree Paradox," Syane says with a shrug as if the idea of an ancient Ardat hunting them down was something she needed to make a note on in her next draft.

"What now?"

"On Earth," she whispers. "The only species that lives nearly as long as Krogan, Asari or Protheans are _plants_. Trees, usually. Perfectly self-repairing. Everything else has a pre-programmed death. Joshua Trees are a desert species. Push five thousand years. And they don't get old. They die."

"What's the difference?" Artemis hisses.

Syane's eyes do that strange paired-movement thing she used to do to freak Arty out when they were little. Right and left pairs working independently on either side of her broad face. Her fingers curl around the slender white grip of the Justicar-built pistol.

"The differences is that a tree that can't age will eventually burn, or get trapped in a flood, or heck, get hit by an asteroid because of random chance. Because it had to weather whatever happened in that one spot for so long. An _animal_ like that has no such limit. Runs off. Protects itself. Oldest recorded Krogan, Iylk the Clanless? Seven thousand. Hermit. Just stayed out of trouble. Burned his hut cooking, they say. Or was murdered."

"Asari cells stop changing at the Matriarch phase. But they don't degrade or lose function. Age sickness is mental, not physical. Just more life experience stuffed up there. We live in a culture where people get along. Asari have five times the human biological imperative to reduce social tension, according to human psychiatric studies."

"She probably would have hugged her granddaughter and committed suicide, stopped eating, gone into the woods, whatever. At least in ancient times. If her madness became a risk to the tribe, it wouldn't even be a hard decision. Stop using your body, being active, going out, so on and eventually and you'll die. That's the relief valve. After a certain age even with no physical decay, more effort is needed to get up every morning."

"So you're saying...what? That's an Ardat older than dirtdown here?"

Syane shrugs.

"Safe, enclosed space, moss for food and to replenish air? No distractions from her drive for self-preservation? Lower oxygen needs than a human or Prothean to begin with? Why not? Unless you'd rather it be a new species that can move doors, yeah."

Arty drops her hands to her shotgun. Systems Alliance surplus Claymore Mark XII, even if it is loaded with eezo-infused explosive shot from a Serrice gun shop. She's her father's daughter. 

"So this 'day trip' was to take me to a vampire warrior queen's tomb without telling me."

"It was a fun surprise?" Syane suggests with forced cheer.

She jerks the other Acolyte out of its holder. Arty groans.

"What?"

"Showoff."

"Are you really mad right now that I can aim both? Using two eyes per gun, missy. Same as you. And in my defense, I thought her being alive was _possible_ but not remotely fucking _likely_ because that means this place was built for that purpose. And I doubted an ancient civilization would have noticed the pattern in Asari deaths!" she hisses.

"Later," Arty scolds. "Guns up, sis. Let's make mom and dad proud."

* * *

**Thessia (Asari homeworld) | Armali city-state**

**Dig Site, Tescani continental shelf**

(167 meters below sea level)

Arty knows those eyes. 

All black and coated in warpfire, a more even and featureless shade than a maiden's ordinary meld. Utterly flat and without hint as to mood or interest. 

They're _her_ eyes. The eyes of an ardat-yakshi in mid-meld. Mid-feed. She's only seen them in a mirror, one night when Nyra wanted to get a little more adventurous than usual and fuck in the dressing room at the summer manor.

Nyra was safe. Secured behind modern medicine and post-Crucible event synthesis of Asari, Human and even some formerly Reaper nano and picotechnology. Nyra wanted Artemis to see what she saw, she said.

This is not her nibbling on Nyra's neck folds and digging her fingers into her back before a party to celebrate their second anniversary while using some extremely difficult-to-make neural implants to keep everyone alive.

This is the wild, raw, nasty truth that so terrified otherwise libertine cultures that they created a totalitarian religious order to deal with it. The face wears no smile, no pre-orgasmic parting of the lips, no softness or affection of any kind. This is a fuck-only-knows-how old killer acting out an ancient script. Ardat who is untreated, doubtless insane from isolation and who is probably used to being given living victims as sacrifices. 

Who has Arty on her back, gun-hand pinned and who got past Syane's incredible senses. 

Or worse. She went through Syane, her nasty Prothean dark energy powers and ten rounds of stasis-programmed ammo per gun. All velocity and resilience, no explosion. Hits a target dummy like a crashing freighter. Her sister doesn't miss, not at close range.

"Stop!" Syane bellows.

"St-o-oop," the creature sounds out, working the word in her mouth.

It's judgy of her but this one she doesn't exactly give off a thinking-being vibe right now. Syane limps into view, seemingly intact but nursing her left leg.

"Kin," Syane tells the creature. "My kin," she adds, tapping her chest.

Arty has a bare-assed guess what happened to make those broad gashes in her sister's wetsuit but this really isn't the time.

"Kin?" the creature murmurs.

"Is that?"

"Yup."

"Yasseni?"

"The same."

"Sy, why are you sort of _randomly_ one-third naked?"

"The suit? That was an accident."

"Why is she doing what you say? For that matter, how is she understanding what you say?"

"That is _less_ of an accident. I pulled her off you before she got started and pushed my memories into her while she tried to feed on me, hoping she'd chill the fuck out and see you like I saw you. Friendly and harmless. She switched into a more traditional, sexy-type meld, things got a bit heated while I distracted and got into a chokehold. She even got a bit of galactic standard off of it. Not much."

" _Tried to feed_? You let her fuck you? Rape you? Are you all right?"

"Fine," Syane huffs. "She didn't actually hurt me, Arty. She just got frisky and it really didn't go far. Not sure I'd know how if she had tried to make it sex. Not like we have any erotic texts in Prothean. I must have parts but fuck knows which are the sexy ones let alone they all do. For all I know, sex for me is like stubbing your toe is for you."

"So I'm right about the Prothean thing, Sy. Some sort of resistance feedback between Prothean sense-sharing and memory lifts and the Asari meld. Thank the Goddess. I feel wy less gross now."

Syane nods.

"Yas, let her go."

"Worthy," Yas repeats. "Mate kin. Go."

Goddess of Miracles, but she does let her go. Syane's hand shoots out and she hauls Arty up.

"Yas? Really?"

Syane flexes her right hand over and over, balling a fist and then dropping it.

"Fuck. That was intense. I'm still piecing together who's who of the memories. Lots of temples, servants, wine. Music. I'm actually pretty sure some of them are mine, blocked by the injury before stasis. It's like my mind was taken out, shaken, warmed up, spit-shined and then put back in. I think that stupid ringing in my ear I've had since third year got knocked loose. I'm starting to see why Melanie went to that club the day of legalization."

Syane shakes her head vigorously and Yasseni snaps up, watching her.

"How is Nyra still _sane_ , alive or not?"

"Do not say that right now!" Arty groans. "You are not allowed to smile about this, Sy! No!"

"I'm just saying! Damn!"

"Fuck you."

* * *

**Thessia (Asari homeworld) | Armali city-state**

**Armali University | Silver Wind Dormitory Complex | Room 1837**

Shep's head is down on the dining room table at her end.

"You what?"

Liara rubs her back. She has been grinning like a fool since Arty relayed the basics. That's not her mom, right now. That's Professor Emeritus Liara T'Soni, head of The University of Serrice Xenoarcheology and Xenocultural studies department. The research board's version of an apex predator.

"She found an Ardat-Yakshi matriarch, dear. It's fine. Second Nomadic era, so bit older than your average matriarch but still."

"Older?" Shepard croaks. "Older? Twelve hundred and three is a bit older. Predates end of the last ice age on Earth? Proves a long-shot theory about Asari aging? That's more than just a 'bit' older."

Liara ignores her wife's freakout.

"Underwater tomb, you said?"

"Yeah, mom. Old Justicar archive writings that predate the Malari Canon. Syane lined it up them with post-war seismic scans from the cleanup. We think maybe the upper entrance was above the waterline before."

"Fascinating."

"Can we get back to the part about the age-old lunatic _attacking_ our little ones?" Shepard groans. "Forcing herself on them? I have nightmares about Mornith, sometimes and not the fight. The almost-happened bit. And I went after _her._ "

"Darling," Liara coos. "I'm sorry. Tell me this next time so I won't make fun."

"S'not very warlike of me," Shep groans.

Shep sits up suddenly.

"What did you do with her?"

Arty blows out a long breath.

"Syane! This one is so fucking _your problem."_

"Hi, mom. Dad. It's cool. She's heavily sedated. I have one of those at-home autosurgery suites on order and Aunty Aria scored one of the Ardat blockers for me. Going to just do the implantation here rather than risk it or make a fuss. Oh!"

She's practically wiggling in her seat.

"I have tons of questions about the old Prothean stuff from where I was found, too."

"Any time darling," Liara mumbles. "in fac-wait. Syane. Why are your eyes _dark_ like that? It's almost like you're post-meld...but no offense dear, but..."

"Not Asari, so I've heard. Sometimes I'm disappointed too."

"Never disappointed in you sweetie, in either of you. Those are what your father's eyes look like...not me."

Shep's beetle-green eyes narrow. Eyes that have lined up a thousand impossible rifle shots across a battlefield. 

"And why in all that's good and holy are you _sweaty_ , young lady?" She growls.

Arty slaps Syane's shoulder and goes to grab her jacket.

"Have fun, sis. I'm going out with Nyra, you're dealing with...all that. You fucking deserve it after the day you put me through yesterday."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't think of a single life form on Earth that ages like Asari do other than slow-growing trees that die when they can't fit where they're planet (they're stuck) so its always been my headcanon that in ideal conditions, with the right self-care, Asari don't die of old age.
> 
> I also just love the idea of Asari as coast-dwelling people at first, deep swimmers in the way humans are grassland-dwelling and unusually tall monkeys. Adaptations for extended dives like whales have are a good way to wave away the masks in ME3 being scuba-diver type masks for full vacuum. The cold and pressure change of space they can handle, they just need the oxygen. I like to think of Ardat-Yakshi as a recessive trait, and in the games it's all but admitted by Samara --a killer specializing in exterminating them--that they are less a moral fault and more some leftover evolutionary overcompensation. Which would track with it being most common in tribes from cold or otherwise harsh areas. Hence, arctic ocean tribes of ancient.


	7. Waking the Lich - Part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is going to be the last section for a while with a deep focus on Artemis, Syane and their families. Look for "Queens of Omega" after this at some point, which will be a rewrite of a goddamn mess of a story I did in a bad place about a post-synthesis ending Shepard family focusing on the kids.

"I'm what now?" Syane mumbles. Her head feels hollow. With Yas in the other room, doped to the neck folds and being carefully examined by a quarantine-suited Karin Chawkas, she can't blame sharing her mind with a nymphomaniac for it.

"Bare minimum, you're noble. We pretty much knew that. Four hundred and nineteen pods were below you in fail-priority and two were tied. In your new memories, you said the walls were yellow?" Liara prods. "With this symbol?"

She taps the sketch.

"Yeah. Rough circle with a hook-shaped blade inside. Red paint, I think."

Liara sighs.

"That's a House Atredio symbol. The dynasty who ruled at the end. Give me ten minutes. I have to write something on the dark exonet. Call you back."

\-----

"This is my fault, little one. You don't remember the war and I wanted to spare you the awfulness all the other survivors went through. I taught you about it like it was written history, not a different culture. Partly because of the fact that what I hoped were citizen scholars were in fact a slave-based, luxury economy of idle tyrants ruled by force of arms and paid for by tributes? It disgusted me. I wanted you to have my values, not the Empire's."

"I'm not loving the good manners of pre-freeze me as I remember her, mother. So mission accomplished."

Mostly, to protect you from discovering how awful it was or seeking out other survivors. We spaced each thawing out by days so that your father could recover. Back then, I hadn't been able to meld the Codex out of her. Drove me mad with jealousy that I couldn't understand their subliminally-rooted, always-shifting languages."

"She re-lived whatever they personally experienced or lifted from loved ones. During the tail end of systematic genocide."

"So what am _I_ remembering?"

"Palace barracks," her mother sighs. "From the fittings, it's the necropolis next in the chain of Resurgence Project bunkers from where we found you. A protected life in the middle of pure hell. Kept content as long as could be managed, then stored away for safekeeping."

"So I'm a soldier? I remember training."

"You said there were women, non-combatants?"

Syane shakes her head, trying to plug a dam in her mind that holds the flood. The worst of the worst of her unburied memories.

"Two, if I recall. My age, I'm guessing. Not like we know that much about Prothean puberty."

"Were their flares flexible? If you can recall."

Syane blows out a long breath.

"Think so, I remember playing a game. Some sort of dart tossing. I won and she let me touch them. They were soft, still dry. Like mine, when you found me."

Liara reaches for her datapad and hastily types something in.

"Hmm. Early pubescence. Matched to your age when we thawed you. Not the guards you described. Sounds more like they were harem girls, not soldiers. From the Age of Splendor on, writings of prisoners and rebels suggest females were aggressively dominant, almost as bad worst of modern human sexists. To have female sex slaves at your disposal? Darling, I think you may have been much higher born than I thought. Or rather, than I feared. If anyone has the bloodline, signal genes and legal claim to be empress, it's you, daughter."

Liara groans. "Goddess. I have to write the other survivors before this spirals into an actual insurrection. Not enough ryncol in the galaxy."

"I'm sending you a file. Prothean erotic text. Take it with a full glass of salt, not just a pinch. Neither a medical explanation or a self-help text. Emulate the heroine's behavior and I disown you."

"The _Moons of Janere_?" Syane asks, reading the file. "Janere..."

"The ancient name for the asari festival, yes. The science team was siloed, their findings masked from each other. Hundreds. Split into one group per continent and basic ecosystem type. The polar-zone team became rank hedonists. Engaged in local fertility rites, kept harems of dozens. Prisoner pens with far more. They killed fewer in their labs, to be fair. Mostly criminals surrendered by the local chieftainess for mere convenience and often in asari-witnessed executions."

Syane opens the file and hits the random page button several times.

"Well..." she mumbles, swallowing with a fast-closing throat. "This, ah..."

"That is the collected and dramatized diary of a petty warlord that the Empress tolerated simply because her research results intrigued. Especially those about Ardats, professional huntresses--back then, literally hunting for game--and Matriarch stage individuals. Caetva was one of the junior researchers on the Thessian project to modify ancient asari. One day, she killed her supervisor and took it over. It's the only firsthand account, or anything like it, that I have that isn't just walls of DNA-RNA interlocks and clinical notes."

"Why didn't you give me this sooner, mother?"

"Besides the fact that it's a lurid journal of someone's sexual uses for--and _abuse of--_ my species?"

"Besides that, yes. That, I understand."

"Well, I haven't slept in six days re-translating it," Liara admits with a cavernous, languid yawn. "That's reason number one. I doubled down when you found Yasseni. Page 319, darling. Read it aloud, please."

> _"This blaze-maiden, Shora, was worn in comparison to the others. Her channel was warm, the grip powerful. Her mind and body had been eroded from a life of killing."_
> 
> _"Whether battle or ravishings, she bore scars nearly as numerous as mine own. But ancestors, she was eager. Feral. A beast among beasts."_
> 
> _"Made to be broken, to be tamed. To be bred. Had I known what a rarity she was, how great a gift the chieftainess made, I might've spared her tribe however weak they were. Raised them to rule the others."_
> 
> _"Shora didn't allow me, she craved me. I didn't take long before I denied any others anything but a quick shake of my frond in their throats before I ate, fed, and hurried through work so I could take Shora again. Shora was endearing. They were relieving."_
> 
> _"I've gone native, I know this. But to see her belly, round and hard as a sandstone orb? To have her place her babe in my arms without a shred of concern or reservation? I could not help it. I hid the baby. Someday, I will be executed for that."_
> 
> _"Love and family makes animals of the best of us."_

"The next nine hundred pages are foaha tree sap, their love affair is so overwrought."

Liara flicks her fingers in a quotation mark gesture around the word love.

"I'm inclined to believe if only because no self-respecting Protehan woman would have written that about a lesser species unless it were true. About a lab animal, for Goddess' sake. The worst of the _Blood of Old Malari_ historical romance novels cannot compare. Best I can determine, blaze-maiden was their term for Ardat-Yakshis," Liara says with a smile. "Probably after the bioluminescence flare they exhibit, earlier in the sexual encounters and continuous. More powerful than non-Ardats."

"Much preferred among both voluntary lovers and slaves they took and some tribes were glad to give them up."

"Her _baby_ ," Syane mutters. "She conceived?"

"After an orgy lasting nine days and after glutting Shora with fatal feeds of by my count, forty-one prisoners. At least then, Ardats were not infertile so much as _extremely_ resistant to conception. Probably because fatal melds don't exactly encourage empathy or emotional twining so central to the deep reach we use to map and conceive."

Syane rubs her flare with her hands.

"You didn't want to get Arty's hopes up."

"I doubt your sister wants biological kids that but until I can establish she can have them, even after multiple attempts to scrub Ardats with viruses? And have it safely? With Nyra? They're _sickeningly_ cute by the way. Every morning I expect to see the application for early marriage and a flood of shrill, panicky notes from the Peeresses. Every morning a tale about finding a pencil in the covers or a schematic under her tea."

Syane chuckles.

"Until then, I'll protect my baby from the hope. Javik taught me that, ironically. While I was still reeling from watching Serrice burn, watching those monsters crack the towers and take the citizens of my adopted city. When for the first time, Shepard and I fled, not just a tactical retreat. Serrice is thirty-five kilometers from the vacation estate. The one without servants quarters, just spaces for them to visit. Where I was conceived, born, raised most of my girlhood. He told me 'Despair is the enemy's greatest weapon. Don't let them wield it.' The way not to despair is not to hope."

"I assume you understand what she means by her 'frond', darling?" Liara teases.

"I have a guess. And ah...I can imagine her...ah...interest in that activity."

Liara hums.

"May I merely get a yes-no on whether the Protheans were dual gendered: males and hermaphroditic females? No details, I beg you. I simply am curious since I only have clues in the gender-sensitive languages. It's 'he' and something more like 'us' or 'we' in the nouns."

"Ah, yes. That seems, ah...likely."

"So you _do blush,_ miracle daughter of mine. Seems Jasseni is good for you."

"I'm learning so many disgusting new things about my biology, the apparent existence of libido and my utter lack of fucking common sense this week," Syane admits.

Liara laughs. Alone, she chuckles and chortles. With Shepard by herside, she barks and guffaws.

"You're a T'Soni, darling. Your mother made over, I must say. I won't be half surprised if Artemis takes over Omega from T'loak but you, I see professorship or authorship in your future, my dear. An intellectual's life and as your mother, I am glad of it."

"Dad is furious."

"Your dad is panicking because you'd done something so _me_ it made her remember all the times she nearly lost me to my numb-crested curiosity. Most of my nasty surprises on digs weren't on their feet and coming at me but the best is sometimes in the messy digs, not the orderly ones. Out past anyone else, where the novelty makes up for the equipment and difficulty preserving a site."

There's a three-knock sequence behind her at the bathroom door. Chakwas waits, then opens it. The woman every last hair is white, though it's still thick and glossy for a hundred fifty-two. Retired, at last.

"What's the prognosis, doctor?" Liara asks through the link.

"Healthy as a varren, if I'm frank. She must have learned to cook the moss somehow, chemically I assume since smoke would have filled the place. No signs of long-term bacteria load. Caught protein somewhere to vary her diet. She eats like she's in starvation recovery and is averse to sleep. Not sure I blame her. Probably afraid it's a dream. Recovering rapidly from the depression of isolation, to be expected given that she coped so long without hurting herself."

Chakwas laughs.

"Syane, you'll be glad to know that she took the blocker implant like it belonged in her all along."

"Ah...I...thank you."

"You were running out of gloves and prophylatics weren't you?" Karin teases.

"Can I not hear my aunt talk about this?" Syane pleads.

"She also kept spouting nonsense I couldn't parse. Same word kept coming up, about three words out of five. Particularly when something agitated her."

"My name," Syane realizes. 

"Anything else?"

"Unusually thin but dense bones, especially in the abdomen and ribcage. Muscles of someone who did martial arts most of the day, for most of her life. Curiously, I think that ancient hox genes must have been used for the Unity virus. Doubt they are ardat-specific but still. Interesting to find them."

"The what virus?"

Chakwas chuckles.

"Before your time, dear. Government-funded treatment after encountering the salarians. The dalatrass donated armies of doctors to it. Immunity boosts, artificial addition of what in humans would be immune system memory and command and control cells. Skeletal changes, loss of vestigial bones. Massive enlargement of some parts of the reproductive system, thickening of suspending tendons in others. Fivefold increase in the flinch reflex of the birth canal's flap, tenfold increase in lubrication gland output. Wholesale addition of new sphincters to block the intestines off. So on, so on."

"We humans launched right into a war after first contact. You lot went through voluntary upgrades so that you went from enough space for two fingers--all you needed for penetrative sex with each other--to where you could take on a bull krogan in full rut and recover in two days. Hundreds of volunteer subjects died getting it right before they pushed it out species-wide."

"Someone in a position of authority wanted you to be ready to fuck phallic males and enjoy it if you ever encountered them. I can only assume the people who started it died of masturbation related injuries when the krogan were discovered."

"Can I not hear my aunt talk about this?" Syane pleads. 

Perhaps if she says it a second time, they wont ignore it.

Chakwas fold her arms and stares her down. This is the woman who confined Shepard herself to bedrest for trifles like gunshot wounds that nicked the spine, after all. Three recorded occasions. A legend among Navy medical recruits.

"Who do you think talked Shepard down, my dear, when she was climbing the station's walls worrying about hurting your mother whatever depravity Liara suggested? Who shushed her when she awoke from drug-induced when your little sisters were about to be born?"

Liara smiles on the link.

"Who do you think stood behind Shepard in the birthing pool as she pulled my daughters into this world, dear?"

"Goddess. I am going to very promptly get very thoroughly drunk this evening."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A species unable to do more than finger each other would have no need for an overly flexible or durable vaginal canal. Nor, for that matter, a sexually specific canal. 
> 
> A clitoris-like organ, vaginal lips, and sensitive walls would have been all that was needed to physically enjoy themselves.
> 
> Anatomical canon here is that Asari wombs sit above the birth channel, separated by a flap of muscle and their fluids are like honey in that they are strongly antimicrobial since this is shared with the digestive system. Until first contact, the 'azure' as it is now popularly called was not adapted for anything bigger than a lover's fingers, which by human standards are quite slim, if longer than typical for human females.
> 
> Debate continues into whether the post-virus anatomy contributed to the modern maiden's sexual appetite with the increased nerve density of the external clitoris and the internal spiral, denser blood flow and near-zero period of oversensitivity.
> 
> #AsariSexEd


	8. Spell slots

**Cleaveland, Ohio**

Soft cheeks nuzzle into the hollow of Willow's throat. Large, lotion-scented hands cup her ribcage and the weight that settles on the bed beside her makes opening her eyes simply too frightening. It might be a dream. The last thirty years since she glutted herelf on every dark spellbook left on Earth and faced off with Apophis the second time? Told the universe to either give Tara back or go fuck itself?

That might all be a dream.

Their brief flirtation with lesbian bed death last year does suggest otherwise but...precautions.

"Morning, little red."

"Mmm, morning farmgirl."

"Mmm, babe...it's Sunday, right? The witchcraft department at Notre Dame doesn't teach in the fall. Farmer's market isn't for months. Let's just stay in bed."

"Do you actually think Buffy will let us?

"Pfft. No."

Tara chuckles.

"Well then, witch of mine, we should get going. We were going to hit up the game store for books and I am dragging your lazy ass through a Target on the way. At the bare minimum, a toothbrush."

"Magic," Willow whines. "I packed soap, you big worrywort."

"If it doesn't work there? Or if trying our mint floss spell creates a rain of frogs? Bad breath, no kisses."

"I'm up!"

Willow sits up so fast the loose energy makes her hair go on end. 

_She's real, thank Hecate._

Tara laughs. Her bottomless baby blues and pillowy lips beckon as she turns Willow and moves in for a quick kiss. She stretches, dragging Willow's old band shirt in all sorts of interesting ways.

"You and your ladyboner mana buzz first thing in the morning. S'cute. It makes you so _easy,_ dear."

\-----

The bell at Cavernous Games tinkles merrily over Willow's head as she pushes the door open.

Seth, the new owner, looks up from his newspaper.

"Morning, ladies."

"Morning."

"What's your pleasure?"

"Were you able to snag those books?" Tara asks.

"Anything for my regulars," he jokes, plunking three massive plastic crates down.

"Fifth Edition everything, figurine collection, greatest hits of the AD&D 3.5 conversions."

Tara whistles. Willow swipes her card and tries not to think about how much of an impulse buy it is.

"Question. Do you use magic to roll?" he teases.

"Not if mundanes are at the table. Seems sketchy. I know I didn't pick a side but they don't," Willow admits. "I do use it to grab the loose ones before Fido gets them."

The resurrected mastiff's skeletal head tilts and from between his ribs he releases a booming, happy bark.

**Woof!**

_Necromancy. A dog lover's best friend._

"Yes boy, you."

Tara has drifted around to browse, keeping back from the nerd whiff and leers of the comic book section's regulars. Three of them eye her hungrily, no doubt grooving on the pink-triangle earrings Willow bought her a few years back. With the only other woman in sight being Willow and Tara definitely being MILF material, it's not much of a leap.

Willow flicks her fingers and the sign over the door shakes violently and sparks dance around the fourth line. Two of the teenagers look up.

_No perving on witches, slayers, or other save the world types. Violators will be banned._

_-Management._

She drops the psionic hold so that the sign clatters back and they know she did that.

"Down, girl. No one's going to hit on Willow's wife. Not in Cleaveland. Even those pipsqueaks remember downtown getting Hellmouth-ed when they were boys. How's work?" Seth asks.

Willow chuckles.

"Same cauldron dregs, different day. A couple of my students are fun, though. I actually have a Jesuit seminarian taking one of my courses. Auditing, at least. Thinks he won't be caught by the higher-ups."

"What?" Seth exclaims. "That's hilarious. Defense 104?"

Willow shakes her head.

"No, actually. New grad level class I co-teach with Amanda from ROTC. Magical Strategy and Witch History in Pre-Renassaince Europe. Military Magic 423. Not sure if he thinks he's going to run into a war witch or an empowered slayer at the Vatican Archives and have to talk her down or that the Karani demons will come back or what. But I don't say no to new perspectives. Forty-ish. Name of Brian O'Toole, if you can believe it."

"Yeah," Seth jokes. "That tracks."

"Hey, do you sell like, travel toothbrushes?"

Seth laughs. 

"Traveling, huh?"

"That obvious? Yeah. The _missus insistus_ that I have mundane toiletries," Willow grumbles.

Seth goes for a drawer behind the counter. 

"Ironically, yes we do. And mouthwash. I think it's more 'a girl came in and wants to play' toothbrushes but same concept."

Willow rolls her eyes. He tosses her a four-pack.

"I mean, twenty years ago, I'd have been scrambling up here in blind panic if I was hunched over _Batwoman_ and she walked in. Can relate."

Tara walks over, drags her nails on Fido's skull and pecks her cheek.

"Ready, honey?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After witches' involvement in dismantling both Hellmouths in the United States at Sunnydale and Cleaveland and once it became clear that the Slayer Army was here to stay (including a small number of witch-slayers with magical gifts) the government poured money into research and as a result, many universities took up magical topics as fields of study. 
> 
> Despite its Catholic roots and protests from the Vatican, Notre Dame was among them in order to not loose grants to Northwestern and the University of Illinois.
> 
> Instructors are typically casters, as the intro practical safety courses cannot be taught by mundanes some are former watchers or mundane scholars in the history and theory branches of the discipline. 
> 
> WIllow, as Prime Witch, is in great demand as a lecturer but she only teaches in person at Notre Dame, a three-ley-line hop from where she and Tara live.
> 
> Tara grows produce for a farmer's market and tries to deal with their twins -- Anya and Jason-- having left for college.
> 
> Fido is their Neopolitan Mastiff who they adopted after graduation from UC Sunnydale and who passed at fourteen. Tara and Willow resurrected him the next All Hallow's Eve. He likes walks but he no longer drools or sheds.


End file.
